Das ifo Institut beleuchtet seit Jahren kritisch die Güte der eigenen Konjunkturprognosen und diskutiert die Gründe für aufgetretene Differenzen zwischen Prognose und Wirklichkeit. Im Jahr 2007 ist die Wirtschaftsentwicklung in Deutschland vom ifo Institut von der Grundtendenz her zutreffend...

This paper compares different ways to estimate the current state of the economy using factor models that can handle unbalanced datasets. Due to the different release lags of business cycle indicators, data unbalancedness often emerges at the end of multivariate samples, which is sometimes...

A couple of recent papers have shifted the focus towards disagreement of professional forecasters. When dealing with survey data that is sampled at a frequency higher than annual and that includes only fixed event forecasts, e.g. expectation of average annual growth rates measures of...

In this paper, we put DSGE forecasts in competition with factor forecasts. We focus on these two models since they represent nicely the two opposing forecasting philosophies. The DSGE model on the one hand has a strong theoretical economic background; the factor model on the other hand is mainly...