Emerging countries in many cases are more crisis-prone than highly developed industrialized countries. This is in many cases due to a weak or volatile financial sector. The best policy to strengthen crisis resistance is the building up of a sound financial position. A sound financial position of...

This Handbook aims to provide an overview of regular survey activities, as well as to show how survey results can be used scientifically in the context of business-cycle analysis and forecasting.

This text contains the autumn forecast 2014 of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, released on 29 October 2014. The first part discusses recent economic developments in Switzerland and abroad, and presents the main forecast results across the various sectors of the economy....

This paper discusses two graphical methods for the investigation of local association of two continuous random variables. Often, scalar dependence measures, such as correlation, cannot reflect the complex dependence structure of two variables. However, dependence graphs have the potential to...

A three parameter (location, scale, shape) generalization of the logistic distribution is fitted to data. Local maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters are derived. Although the likelihood function is unbounded, the likelihood equations have a consistent root. ML-estimation combined with...

Mit einem Markov-Switching-Modell können die monatlichen Veränderungen des ifo Geschäftsklimas in Wahrscheinlichkeiten für die beiden konjunkturellen Regime »Expansion« bzw. «Kontraktion« umgesetzt werden. Diese Wahrscheinlichkeiten – abgebildet in der ifo Konjunkturampel – liefern...

Gesamtwirtschaftliche Indikatoren sollten zyklische Wendepunkte der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Produktion zuverlässig und mit statistisch signifikantem Vorlauf anzeigen. Stets muss beurteilt werden, ob die monatliche Veränderung eines Indikators einen Wechsel des konjunkturellen Regimes und damit...