We suggest an alternative indicator based on the car sales price placed on the Internet for measuring economic inequality among regions. The regional data on car prices in Germany were downloaded from two specialised websites http://www.mobile.de and http://www.autoscout24.de in December 2011....

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 145 indicators and ten types of forecast combination schemes to predict housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. We are interested in whether local business confidence indicators facilitate substantial improvements of the forecasts,...

We suggest to use information from the state register of personal cars as an alternative indicator of economic inequality in countries with a large share of shadow economy. We illustrate our approach using the Latvian pool of personal cars. Our main finding is that the extent of household...

The paper evaluates the quality of the German national accounting data (GDP and its use-side components) as measured by the magnitude and dispersion of the forecast/revision errors. It is demonstrated that government consumption series are the least reliable, whereas real GDP and real private...

In this paper we perform a comparative study of the forecasting properties of the alternative leading indicators for Germany using the growth rates of German real GDP. We use the post-unification data which cover years from 1991 through 2004. We detect a structural break in the growth rates that...

Die Kaufpreise für Eigentumswohnungen sind seit Beginn des Jahres 2010 um durchschnittlich sechs Prozent gegenüber dem jeweiligen Vorjahresquartal gestiegen. Die Wachstumsraten der Mietpreise haben mit vier Prozent deutlich weniger zugenommen, liegen aber ebenfalls oberhalb der allgemeinen...

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the annual growth rates of the real GDP for each of the 16 German Länder (states) simultaneously. Beside the usual panel data models, such as pooled and fixed-effects models, we apply panel models that explicitly account for spatial dependence...