Germany’s comparatively good economic performance throughout the Great Recession of the years 2008/2009 is often attributed to the business model of the German Mittelstand firm. Somewhat surprisingly, this claim has never been backed by empirical evidence. In this paper we use micro panel data...

Forecasts of macroeconomic variables as the inflation rate serve as important guidelines for the private as well as the public sector. At least central banks that adopted an inflation targeting regime are in urgent need of high quality inflation forecasts. Accurate inflation forecasts are also...

Traditionell werden Prognosen über den Ausgang von politischen Wahlen aus Befragungsdaten gewonnen. Seit etwas mehr als einem Jahrzehnt beschäftigen sich auch Ökonomen vermehrt mit der Frage, wie eine gute Wahlprognose gewonnen werden kann. Als Instrument hierzu wurde die politische...

We report and analyze the results of a series of classroom experiments on the voluntary provision of public goods. Using fixed effect panel regression models we find that cooperation significantly increases when participants are forced to guess the degree of overall cooperation. We also find...

This note focuses on the role of the planning horizon in monetary policy games. We analyze the case of an uncertain horizon of the monetary policy game that has not been considered, yet. In addition to that we will - different from the basic Barro-Gordon-model - assume a quadratic loss function...

Accurate real-time macroeconomic data are essential for policy-making and economic nowcasting. In this paper, I introduce a real-time database for German regional economic accounts (READ-GER). The database contains real-time information for nine macroeconomic aggregates and the 16 German states....

In this study, we evaluate whether survey-based indicators produce lower forecast errors for export growth than indicators obtained from hard data such as price and cost competitiveness measures. Our pseudo out-of-sample analyses and forecastencompassing tests reveal that survey-based indicators...