Excessive speculation on asset markets can cause significant macroeconomic losses in terms of production and employment. Such developments should be detected as early and as reliably as possible in order to enable corrective action through adequate economic policy measures. This is the goal of...

Die deutsche Exportindustrie ist traditionell auf die Lieferung von Investitionsgütern spezialisiert. Daher kann die Schätzung der zukünftigen Entwicklung der Investitionsgüterexporte für die Prognose der gesamten deutschen Ausfuhren von Nutzen sein. Die Investitionstätigkeit von...

A recurrent theme in the literature on business cycle fluctuations is the importance of expectational shocks that change the beliefs of agents concerning the future level of aggregate activity, but that do not reflect real movements in the fundamentals. This paper employs the ASA-NBER Survey of...

This paper develops a real business cycle model characterized by idiosyncratic employment shocks and quantitatively explores the behavior of aggregate variables under the assumptions of complete and incomplete insurance markets. The results show that the model with incomplete markets produces...

In this paper the accuracy of a wide range of German business cycle forecasters is assessed for the period from 1995 to 2005. For this purpose, a data set is used comprising forecasts published on a monthly basis by Consensus Economics. The application of several descriptive as well as...

Von spekulativen Übertreibungen an den Vermögensmärkten können erhebliche makroökonomische Verluste für Produktion und Beschäftigung ausgehen. Solche Entwicklungen sollten möglichst frühzeitig und verlässlich erkannt werden, um eine Gegensteuerung durch entsprechende...

Resumen Las crisis económicas se caracterizan por estar relacionadas con los procesos de toma de decisión, sin embargo las fallas de coordinación e información de los mercados generan perturbaciones que causan un gran impacto en las variables macroeconómicas agregadas y por ende en el...

Several prominent economists have argued that existing DSGE models cannot properly account for the evolution of key macroeconomic variables during and following the recent Great Recession. We challenge this argument by showing that a standard DSGE model with financial frictions available prior...

The tradable sector has a lower consumption-output comovement than that in the nontradable sector. An artificial autarky generates identical comovements. Once the economy is open, however, the comovement in the nontradable sector becomes too low. The paper demonstrates that the intensity of...

We study the role of sentiment variables as predictors for US recessions. We combine sentiment variables with either classical recession predictors or common factors based on a large panel of macroeconomic and financial variables. Sentiment variables hold vast predictive power for US recessions...