The current economic crisis requires fast information to predict economic behavior early, which is difficult at times of structural changes. This paper suggests an innovative new method of using data on internet activity for that purpose. It demonstrates strong correlations between keyword...

The Google Insights data are a collection of recorded Internet searches for a huge number of the keywords, which are available since January 2004. These searches represent a kind of revealed perceptions of Internet users, which are a (possibly not entirely representative) sample of the general...

In this paper, we investigate whether the Google search activity can help in nowcasting the year-on-year growth rates of monthly US private consumption using a real-time data set. The Google-based forecasts are compared to those based on a benchmark AR(1) model and the models including the...

We propose a noncausal autoregressive model with time-varying parameters, and apply it to U.S. postwar inflation. The model .fits the data well, and the results suggest that inflation persistence follows from future expectations. Persistence has declined in the early 1980.s and slightly...

The GARCH(1,1) model and its extensions have become a standard econometric tool for modeling volatility dynamics of financial returns and port-folio risk. In this paper, we propose an adjustment of GARCH implied conditional value-at-risk and expected shortfall forecasts that exploits the...

This paper contributes to the debate of whether central banks can \lean against the wind" of emerging stock or house price bubbles. Against this background, the paper evaluates if new advances in real-time bubble detection, as brought forward by Phillips et al. (2011), can timely detect bubble...

Dieser Beitrag möchte einen Impuls zur stärkeren Berücksichtigung von Genderaspekten in makroökonomischen Modellen geben. Am Beispiel der Philipps-Kurve geht es um die Frage, ob sich das Erwerbsverhalten von Frauen und Männern so stark voneinander unterscheidet, dass sich dies im Verlauf...

Large panels of variables are used by policy makers in deciding on policy actions. Therefore it is desirable to include large information sets in models for economic analysis. In this survey methods are reviewed for accounting for the information in large sets of variables in vector...

Tracking online user behavior is essential for targeted advertising and is at the heart of the business model of major online platforms. We analyze tracker-specific web browsing data to show how the prediction quality of consumer profiles varies with data size and scope. We find decreasing...

Based on a panel of German professional forecasts for 1970 to 2003 we find that growth and inflation forecasts are unbiased and weakly, but not strongly efficient. Besides the effect of diverging forecasting dates, no other substantial differences in forecasting quality are found among...