Business Tendency Surveys (BTS) continue to be an important source of timely information on business cycles in many countries. We address quality of economic survey data by uncovering the relation between unit non-response and participant characteristics on company respectively respondent level....

This paper reexamines U.S. business cycle volatility since 1867. We employ dynamic factor analysis as an alternative to reconstructed national accounts. We find a remarkable volatility increase across World War I, which is reversed after World War II. While we can generate evidence of postwar...

We use a Bayesian dynamic factor model in order to calculate an economic activity index for Germany prior to World War I. The procedure allows us to incorporate information from a vast number of time series, which are underutilized by historical national accounts. Therefore, our indicator...

This paper examines the role of currency and banking in the German financial crisis of 1931 for both Germany and the U.S. We specify a structural dynamic factor model to identify financial and monetary factors separately for each of the two economies. We find that monetary transmission through...

This paper investigates how inflation expectations evolve. In particular, we analyze the time-varying nature of the propensity to update expectations and its potential determinants. For this purpose we set up a flexible econometric model that tracks the formation of inflation expectations of...