Expectations form the basis of economic decisions of market participants in an uncertain world. Sentiment indicators reflect those expectations and thus have a proven track record for predicting economic variables. However, respondents of surveys perceive the world to a large extent with the...

In an uncertain world, decisions by market participants are based on expectations. Thus, sentiment indicators reflecting expectations are proven at predicting economic variables. However, survey respondents largely perceive the world through media reports. Typically, crude media information,...

World War I led to radical changes in the government policy of participating countries. The enormous demographic and economic disturbances caused by the war forced the governments of all the belligerent nations to drastically restrict the market freedom. In particular, the state began actively...

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started in March 2014 resulted in bilateral economic sanctions imposed by Russia and Western countries, including the members of the euro area (EA). The paper investigates the impact of sanctions on the real side of the economy of Russia and the EA....

Rising rents in German cities have led to an intense debate about the need for tighter rent controls in housing markets. In April 2015, the so-called rental brake was introduced, which imposes upper bounds for rents in new contracts, in order to immediately slow down the increase of rents in...

In the light of the unconventional monetary policies conducted by the majority of large central banks around the world, there is an intense debate about their potential impact on the prices of capital assets. Particularly in Germany, skepticism about the sustainability of the recent policy by...

Die Energieeffizienz von Immobilien gilt als zentraler Baustein der Energiewende. Obwohl seit einigen Jahren große Anstrengungen unternommen werden, Energieeffizienzinvestitionen zu steigern, verharrt die Sanierungsquote auf konstantem Niveau. Ein Grund für ausbleibende Investitionen ist das...

We use a neoclassical production function to analyze the effects of knowledge spillovers via entrepreneurship on economic performance of 337 German districts. To take the spatial dependence structure of the data into account, we estimate a spatial Durbin model. We highlight the importance of the...

We assess the contribution of macroeconomic uncertainty -- approximated by the dispersion of the real GDP survey forecasts -- to the ex post and ex ante prediction of stock price bubbles. For a panel of six OECD economies covering 24 years, two alternative binary chronologies of bubble periods...