Growth of the Korean economy has been sluggish, and this situation is more pronounced in the service sector. We argue that capital misallocation, especially in the service sector, could contribute to this slowdown. Utilizing firm and sectoral level data, first we assess the rising dispersion of...

The existence of fluctuations is part of the narrative, especially when there is a slowdown (or worse, a contraction) in economic activity. The presence of long waves with a period of about 50 years as proposed by Kondratieff is one of the most controversial and fascinating theories about...

Over the past 10 years dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have become an important tool in quantitative macroeconomics. However, DSGE models were not considered as a forecasting tool until very recently. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we compare the forecasting...

The aim of this paper is to construct a forecasting model oriented on predicting basic macroeconomic variables, namely: the GDP growth rate, the unemployment rate, and the consumer price inflation. In order to select the set of the best regressors, Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimators...

Die Gemeinschaftsdiagnose prognostiziert für 2013 eine leichte Konjunkturbelebung für die Weltwirtschaft. Die Entwicklung in Europa ist dagegen mit Unsicherheiten behaftet. Deutschland wird allerdings wohl etwas rascher wachsen als die EU im Durchschnitt. Dabei kommen die entscheidenden...

In this paper, the authors construct country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1-2009:Q4. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental approach and a filter approach. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is...

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...

Crises are triggered by the inherent uncertainty of the capitalist system. We represent this uncertainty in an open economy real business cycle model of the UK by including non-stationary productivity shocks. A random sequence of good or bad shocks will accumulate, producing euphorias and...

From a theoretical perspective, the output gap is probably the most comprehensive and convincing concept to describe the cyclical position of an economy. Unfortunately, for practical purposes, the concept depends on the determination of potential output, which is an inherently unobservable...