Das ifo Geschäftsklima, der wichtigste Indikator für die Konjunktur in Deutschland, ist als Mittelwert der beiden Komponenten »Geschäftslage« und »Geschäftserwartungen für die nächsten sechs Monate« definiert. 1993 wurde vom ifo Institut der zyklische Zusammenhang zwischen den beiden...

Das ifo Geschäftsklima, der wichtigste Indikator für die Konjunktur in Deutschland, ist als Mittelwert der beiden Komponenten »Geschäftslage« und »Geschäftserwartungen für die nächsten sechs Monate« definiert. 1993 wurde vom ifo Institut der zyklische Zusammenhang zwischen den beiden...

An examination of Swedish manufacturing data on real output and qualitative business tendency survey (BTS) responses from 1968 through 1998 reveals that survey-based attitude data typically improve the fit of simple autoprojective models of manufacturing output growth. It also turns out that...

Leading indicators are typical constructs used in macroeconomics to guide decision making in several areas of economic activity, including policy formation and long term investment. Researchers often evaluate and select leading indicators on a seemingly ad hoc basis involving OLS regression,...

Probit models are employed to evaluate leading indicators for Germany's recessions. The predictive power of leading indicators is found to be lower than assumed in previous studies. Although, monetary variables provide the best predictive power for recessions, survey data and order inflows show...

This paper aims at providing a detailed analysis of the leading indicator properties of corporate bond spreads for real economic activity in the euro area. In- and out-of-sample predictive content of corporate bond spreads are examined along three dimensions: the bonds’ quality , their term to...

Measuring economic activity in real-time is a crucial issue in applied research and in the decision-making process of policy makers; however, it also poses intricate challenges to statistical filtering methods that are built to operate optimally under the auspices of an infinite number of...

Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across...

This paper aims at providing a detailed analysis of the leading indicator properties of corporate bond spreads for real economic activity in the euro area. In- and out-of-sample predictive content of corporate bond spreads are examined along three dimensions: the bonds' quality, their term to...

The 2007-2009 financial crisis has shown the importance of understanding economic and financial dynamics for the evaluation of systemic risks. In this article, we use classical perturbation theory of dynamical systems to measure the global stability of the financial system. We analyze the...