I contribute to previous research on the efficient integration of forecasters' narratives into business cycle forecasts. Using a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, I quantify 19,300 paragraphs from German business cycle reports (1998-2021) and classify the...

In his article, Sebastian Knake challenges the general assumption that traditional savings accounts in the US disappeared naturally as a result of the combination of interest rate regulation and extraordinarily high market interest rates during the stagflation period. By comparing the US...

Using firm-level data, we study how firm expectations adjust to news while accounting for a) the heterogeneity of news and b) the heterogeneity of firms. We classify news as either micro or macro, that is, information about firm-specific developments or information about the aggregate economy....

I propose a novel approach to uncover business cycle reports' priorities and relate them to economic fluctuations. To this end, I leverage quantitative business-cycle forecasts published by leading German economic research institutes since 1970 to estimate the proportions of latent topics in...

Recently, much attention has been devoted to the measurement of macroeconomic (expectation) uncertainty and its impact on aggregate economic fuctuations. This paper presents a new qualitative measure of macroeconomic expectation uncertainty based on data from a German online survey of consumer...

We propose to treat survey-based density expectations as compositional data when testing either for heterogeneity in density forecasts across different groups of agents or for changes over time. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed test has more power relative to both a bootstrap...

The notion of a nation-specific inflation trauma among the German population is ubiquitous in the public debate in Germany and beyond. Because of its experience with hyperinflation in 1923, the German population fears rising prices and favors stability-oriented monetary as well as fiscal policy....

Since the late 1960s, the rising volatility of financial markets in the US has troubled econometricians and bank managers alike. Both professions have found it increasingly difficult to forecast savings deposit flows. This article explores these challenges by focusing on two developments. First,...

The full-information rational expectations (FIRE) assumption is at the core of modern macroeconomics. We revisit recent evidence which rejects FIRE based on survey data. It relates forecast errors to news at different levels of aggregation. The evidence based on consensus forecasts testifies...