In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 115 indicators to predict the housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. Above all, we are interested in whether the local business confidence indicators can allow substantially improving the forecasts, given the local nature of the...

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...

In this paper we analyze the impact of the economic reforms implemented in 1980s and of the Custom Union Agreement of 1996 on the intra-industry trade in Turkey. Using the panel data for 15 trading partners of Turkey and the sample period 1970-2005, we record the positive impact of both reforms...

In this paper we perform a comparative study of the forecasting properties of the about 30 alternative leading indicators for Germany using the growth rates of German real GDP. In addition to them, we have constructed a diffusion index based on the principal component analysis and including 145...

The Google Insights data are a collection of recorded Internet searches for a huge number of the keywords, which are available since January 2004. These searches represent a kind of revealed perceptions of Internet users, which are a (possibly not entirely representative) sample of the general...

We suggest to use Internet car sale price advertisements for measuring economic inequality between and within German regions. Our estimates of regional income levels and Gini indices based on advertisements are highly, positively correlated with the official figures. This implies that the...

This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rates in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model...

In this study, we investigate whether population aging influences employment shares in different economic sectors. To this end, we employ dynamic panel data analysis. Our unbalanced data set comprises 54 countries and extends to a maximum time period from 1970 till 2004. Our results suggest that...

In this study, we suggest an explanation for the alarmingly low growth rates of real housing prices in Canada and Germany in comparison to other OECD countries over 1975-2005. We show that the long-run development of housing markets is determined by real disposable per capita income, real...

This paper suggests a novel approach to pre-selection of the component series of the diffusion index based on their individual forecasting performance. It is shown that this targeted selection allows substantially improving the forecasting ability compared to the diffusion index models that are...