Bond yield and retail interest rate spreads are presumed to lead real activity on the basis of financial accelerator mechanisms, markup cyclicality or simply because they are forward-looking. Empirical results for Austria show that retail rate spreads outperform many other indicators in this...

This study assesses the claim that the Austrian economy depends mainly on the German business cycle. Controlling for possible influences from the U.S. economy, it is confirmed that the Austrian and German industrial production indexes have a common long-term stochastic trend and the German...