Are all forecasters the same? Expectations models incorporating information rigidities typically imply forecasters are interchangeable which predicts an absence of systematic patterns in individual forecast behavior. Motivated by this prediction, we examine the European Central Bank's Survey of...

The German economy continues to stagnate. After it appeared to finally be growing at the start of 2024, it experienced a slight setback in the second quarter. Although incomes are rising and inflation is now near the two-percent target, people in Germany are saving their money. As investments...

The Central Banks use diffusion indexes (DIs) to synthesize information from proprietary surveys that complement official statistics generating real-time proxies of the economically relevant variables. According to the evidence, the DIs closely follow the economic cycle reflected in those...

The German economy began recovering at the beginning of 2024 and has developed better than initially expected. A sharp rise in construction investment, albeit more of a flash in the pan as a result of mild winter weather, along with strong goods exports helped the economy onto its recov¬ery...

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...