Does time-varying business volatility affect the price setting of firms and thus the transmission of monetary policy into the real economy? To address this question, we estimate from the firm-level micro data of the German IFO Business Climate Survey the impact of idiosyncratic volatility on the...

This paper applies linear discriminant analysis to classify West German business cycles from 1955 to 1994 into a four phase scheme (upswing, downswing, and upper/lower turning point phases). It describes the scheme as well as the selection of the classifying variables, and presents...

The recent renaissance of business cycle analysis has led to a renewed interest in business cycle classification as pioneered by Burns/Mitchell, Spiethoff and resumed in the seventies by Meyer/Weinberg (1975a, b). The rather successful elaboration and test of a “modern” four-phase...

The classical cobweb theorem is extended to include production lags and price forecasts. Price forecasting based on a longer period has a stabilizing effect on prices. Longer production lags do not necessarily lead to unstable prices; very long lags lead to cycles of constant amplitude. The...

This paper discusses a large-scale factor model for the German economy. Following the recent literature, a data set of 121 time series is used via principal component analysis to determine the factors, which enter a dynamic model for German GDP. The model is compared with alternative univariate...

This paper empirically assesses the impact of specialisation on the synchronisation of regional business cycles in two core countries of EMU, namely France and Germany. Several specialisation indices are introduced and some first stylised facts about interregional business cycle correlations are...

Das vorliegende Papier schätzt auf Basis eines Probit-Modells die Wendepunkte des ifo-Geschäftserwartungsindex. Die übliche Vorgehensweise in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur wird um zwei Aspekte erweitert: Erstens werden zusätzlich zu einzelnen Variablen sogenannte Faktoren berücksichtigt,...

Die Arbeit untersucht die Aussagen des Sachverständigenrates zur Beurteilung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (SVR) bezüglich der Stabilität der Finanzmärkte. Die systemischen Risiken von Finanzmärkten werden vom SVR klar angesprochen, die Notwendigkeit einer staatlichen Regulierung...

In an influential recent paper, Beaudry and Portier (2006) propose a sequential approach for identifying technological news shocks. Thereby, the correlation coefficient between news shocks of a short-run identification scheme and technology shocks of a long-run identification scheme in the VAR...