Modern systems of official statistics require the accurate and timely estimation of socio-demographic indicators for disaggregated geographical regions. Traditional data collection methods such as censuses or household surveys impose great financial and organizational burdens for National...

From 2014 until present, housing prices in Germany have been rising faster than consumer prices in all quarters except one, raising concerns about an excessive over-heating of the housing market. To assess the vulnerability of the German housing market to a future realignment of prices or even a...

The current paper broadens the understanding for the role of uncertainty in the context of a macroeconomic environment. It focuses on the implications of uncertainty shocks on indicators that tend to precede financial crises. In an empirical analysis we show for a set of four euro area countries...

During the last years more and more discussions came up about the contribution of technology-oriented and technology-intensive industries for employment and economic development. One reason for some of the contradictory evaluations of technology-intensive industries can be attributed to...

How can we assess the welfare of a society, its evolution over time and predict its change due to particular policy interventions? One way is to use survey-based welfare indicators such as the OECD Better Life Index. It invites people to weight a variety of quality of life indicators according...

Since the influential paper of Stock and Watson (2002), the dynamic factor model (DFM) has been widely used for forecasting macroeconomic key variables such as GDP. However, the DFM has some weaknesses. For nowcasting, the dynamic factor model is modified by using the mixed data sampling...

This paper contributes to the literature on early warning indicators by applying a Bayesian model averaging approach. Our analysis, based on Austrian data, is carried out in two steps: First, we construct a quarterly financial stress index (AFSI) quantifying the level of stress in the Austrian...