In this paper we assess the information content of seven widely cited early indicators for the euro area with respect to forecasting area-wide industrial production. To this end, we use various tests that are designed to compare competing forecast models. In addition to the standard...

After the eastern enlargement of the European Union due to increasing labor market integration, wage determination and monetary integration in Central and Eastern Europe have become key issues in European economic policy making. Based on the Scandinavian model of wage adjustment by Lindbeck...

This paper explores the importance of housing and mortgage market heterogeneity in 12 European countries for the transmission of monetary policy. We use a panel VAR model which is estimated over the period 1995–2006 to generate impulse responses of key macroeconomic variables to a monetary...

This paper studies the causes of price dispersion in the euro area emerging in response to a shock that hits all member countries symmetrically. We use a panel VAR model which is estimated over the period 1996–2007 to generate impulse responses of a range of price and wage variables to an oil...

What were the economic consequences of the 2007/08 oil price hike for Germany? In this paper we use a structural vector autoregressive model to study the effects of oil price changes driven by different supply and demand shocks on the German economy. We find that a higher oil bill always stifles...

Over the last decade, the topic of regional economic forecasting has become increasingly prevalent in academic literature. The most striking problem in this context is data availability at a regional level. However, considerable methodological improvements have been made to address this problem....

In this paper we present the Ifo Investment Database, which provides annual investment data for 12 investment assets in 50 German industries from 1991 onward. The data is consistent with national accounts statistics provided by the German Federal Statistical Office and is based on investments in...

We examine how regularly scheduled macroeconomic announcements for the U.S., Germany and the euro area affect the German stock market, using high–frequency, minute–by–minute DAX data. Our study extends the literature on high–frequency announcement effects in several ways. First, we...

In this paper, we assess the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts at the regional level using a unique data set at quarterly frequency. We forecast gross domestic product (GDP) for two German states (Free State of Saxony and Baden-Württemberg) and Eastern Germany. We overcome the problem of a...

It is well-known that the distribution of citations to articles in a journal is skewed. We ask whether journal rankings based on the impact factor are robust with respect to this fact. We exclude the most cited paper, the top 5 and 10 cited papers for 100 economics journals and recalculate the...