The paper analyzes leading indicators for GDP and industrial production in Germany. We focus on the performance of single and pooled leading indicators during the pre-crisis and crisis period using various weighting schemes. Pairwise and joint significant tests are used to evaluate single...

The ifo Institute is Germany’s largest business survey provider, with the ifo Business Climate Germany as one of the most important leading indicators for gross domestic product. However, the ifo Business Survey is not solely limited to the Business Climate and also delivers a multitude of...

We evaluate the usefulness of satellite-based data on night-time lights for forecasting GDP growth across a global sample of countries, proposing innovative location-based indicators to extract new predictive information from the lights data. Our findings are generally favorable to the use of...

A reflection on the lackluster growth over the decade since the Global Financial Crisis has renewed interest in preventative measures for a long-standing problem. Advances in machine learning algorithms during this period present promising forecasting solutions. In this context, the paper...

This paper uses several macroeconomic and financial indicators within a Markov Switching (MS) framework to predict the turning points of the business cycle. The presented model is applied to monthly German real-time data covering the recession and the recovery after the financial crisis. We show...

Different studies provide surprisingly a large variety of controversial conclusions aboutthe forecasting power of an indicator, even when it is supposed to forecast the sametime series. In this study we aim to provide a thorough overview of linear forecastingtechniques and draw conclusions...

This paper analyses the recession in 2008/2009 in Germany, which is very different from previous recessions, in particular regarding its cause and magnitude. We show to what extent forecasters and forecasts based on leading indicators fail to detect the timing and the magnitude of the recession....

Business tendency survey indicators are widely recognized as a key instrument for business cycle forecasting. Their leading indicator property is assessed with regard to forecasting industrial production in Russia and Germany. For this purpose, vector autoregressive (VAR) models are specified...

In this paper, we assess the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts at the regional level using a unique data set at quarterly frequency. We forecast gross domestic product (GDP) for two German states (Free State of Saxony and Baden-Württemberg) and Eastern Germany. We overcome the problem of a...

We use the gradient boosting estimation technique and the ROC curveto non-parametrically measure and exploit the maximal predictive powerof leading indicators for the future state of the business cycle. We de-velop novel procedures for finding the best performing transformationsof individual...