This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

An eternal motive of human existence is the search for guidance.While values and beliefs retain their high relevance, today's enlightened societies also tend to rest their aspirations and decisions on the actual facts and on a sober assessment of possible courses of events emerging from...

This paper investigates the differences between directly and indirectly seasonally adjusted aggregates. This difference is derived analytically for linear seasonal adjustment methods. GDP data for five European countries and three classes of seasonal adjustment methods are used to show...