This paper studies the information content of some Ifo indicators. In particular, we investigate whether two Ifo indicators, one on the current business situation, the other on current production development, provide information on revisions of German industrial production. A new feature of our...

This paper analyses revisions of Swiss current account data, taking into account the actual data revision process and the implied types of revisions. In addition we investigate whether the first release of current account data can be improved upon by the use of survey results as gathered by the...

The negative effects of climate change on output and productivity have been well documented in recent years. However, its impact on public finances has received little attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by analysing the impact of climate anomalies on fiscal variables in a...

We develop multivariate measures of synchronicity and co-movement of business cycles. In addition to synchronicity, the co-movement measure takes differences between cycle amplitudes into account that have been overlooked in most previous studies. We apply the new measures to the euro area....

Using the measures proposed by Mink et al. (2012), we reexamine the coherence of business cycles in the euro area using a long sample period. We also analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business cycle coherence and examine whether our measures for business cycle coherence indicate a...

We develop multivariate measures of synchronicity and co-movement of business cycles. In addition to synchronicity, the co-movement measure takes differences between cycle amplitudes into account that have been overlooked in most previous studies. We apply the new measures to the euro area....

This paper develops concordance indices for studying the simultaneous occurrence of financial crises. The indices are designed to cope with these typically low incidence events. This leads us to confine attention to non-tranquil periods to develop a bivariate index and its multivariate analog...

Financial crises are high cost events which can transmit across international borders. Using data from 1883 to 2008, this article develops a means of mapping changes in the degree of international synchronisation of banking and currency crises through a formal concordance index. This index...

This paper employs concepts from information theory to choosing the dimension of a data set. We propose a relative information measure connected to Kullback-Leibler numbers. By ordering the series of the data set according to the measure, we are able to obtain a subset of a data set that is most...