Survey data on expectations and economic forecasts play an important role in providing better insights into how economic agents make their own forecasts and why agents disagree in making them. Using data from the European Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF), we consider measures of...

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) began to use a band-pass filter, based on the Hodrick-Prescott filter (HPband-pass filter), to calculate the composite leading indicators (CLIs) in December2008. Other than the filter adopted by the OECD, there is an alternative...

The Optimal Currency Area theory stresses the importance of co-movement of the business cycles of member states in order for the common currency to be successful. Yet, the identification of (European) business cycles has been inconclusive and is complicated by the enlargement to the new member...

The paper presents the results of the first application of cyclical analysis to economic activity in Serbia. The analysis refers to the period 2001-07, which marked the start of democratic and economic reforms, since short term fluctuations in economic activity prior to 2001 were the result of...

Despite energy price hikes in recent years, growth rates turned out to be high in most industrialised countries. This pattern starkly contrasts the adverse effects that energy price shocks exerted on growth in the 1970s and 1980s. This study investigates whether a reduction in the energy cost...

We estimate and forecast growth in euro area monthly GDP and its components from the dynamic factor model of Doz et al. (2006), which handles unbalanced data sets in an efficient way. We extend the model to integrate interpolation and forecasting with cross-equation accounting identities. A...

The balanced growth and stochastic growth theory implies stable consumption-to-output and investment-to-output ratios. It is tested by cointegration techniques for three different German data vintages. Systems cointegration tests are helpful in revealing inconsistencies across vintages....

Based on annual data for growth and inflation forecasts for Germany covering the 1970-2007 period and up to 17 different forecasts per year, we test for a possible asymmetry of the forecasters’ loss function and estimate the degree of asymmetry for each forecasting institution using the...

In 2005, European Union member countries began to calculate national account volume estimates using prices from the previous year, rather than from a fixed base year. For quarterly national accounts, the average of the total previous year – and not of the previous quarter – began to serve as...

Business cycle indicators are used to assess the economic situation of countries or regions. They are closely watched by the public, but are not easy to interpret. Does a current movement of the indicator signal a turning point or not? With the help of Markov Switching Models movements of...