Could a researcher or policy analyst use data reported from surveys of consumer confidence to improve forecasts of consumer spending? This issue has been examined in the literature previously, which reached the conclusion that consumer confidence data helped improve the forecasts slightly, but...

We propose a regression-based algorithm that allows to construct arbitrarily many comparable, multi-annual, consistent time series on monthly, weekly, daily, hourly and minute-by-minute search volume indices based on the scattered data obtained from Google Trends. The accuracy of the algorithm...

This paper develops alternative text-based indexes assessing human sentiment and economic uncertainty in the oil market. The text analysis includes the titles and full articles of 138,797 oil related news items which featured in The Financial Times, Thompson-Reuters and The Independent from...

We investigate the predictive power of several leading indicators in order to forecast industrial production in Germany. In addition, we compare their predictive performance with variables from two competing categories, namely macroeconomic and financial variables. The predictive power within...