In the summer and at the end of the year, the Ifo Institute publishes its detailed economic forecasts for Germany. In the spring and the autumn, it participates in the Joint Economic Forecast of the six German economic research institutes. - Economic forecasts are a means to assess future...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...