This paper estimates the pass-through and speed of adjustment of Italian regional interest rates to changes in the money market rate for the period 1998Q1-2009Q4. Our main findings suggest that the markup for the lending rates that banks charge are generally higher in the South than in the...

In a pioneering attempt we present the R(ecession)-word index for Switzerland. We evaluate its predictive ability of GDP growth using real-time vintages of GDP data, closely simulating flow of information in the past. We find that inclusion of the R-word index led to statistically significant...

On the basis of keyword searches in newspaper articles several versions of the Recession-word Index (RWI) are constructed for Germany and Switzerland. We use these indices in order to track the business cycle dynamics in these two countries. Our main findings are the following. First, we show...

This study evaluates forecasting performance of a large-scale factor model developed in Siliverstovs and Kholodilin (2012) in a genuine ex ante forecasting exercise. We perform our forecast of GDP growth in Switzerland in real time using real-time data vintages collected at weekly frequency....

The current debt crisis has shed light on the importance of accurate fiscal forecasts. In particular, the accuracy of revenue forecasts is central since they set the limit within which expenditure should remain in order to reach fiscal balance. Therefore, forecasting tax revenue accurately is a...

The present paper studies the relationship between R&D investment and firm productivity growth by explicitly accounting for non-linearities in the R&D-productivity relationship and inter-sectoral firm heterogeneity. In order to address these issues, we employ a two step estimation approach, and...

This study investigates usefulness of business tendency surveys in industrial sector for out-of-sample prediction of growth of industrial production in Russia. A special attention is paid to performance of survey-augmented models during the recent Great Recession 2008/2009. Using the real-time...

This paper presents a composite leading indicator for the Swiss business cycle corresponding to the growth rate cycle concept. It is the result of a complete overhaul of the KOF Economic Barometer that has been published by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute on a monthly basis since 1976. In line...

The paper addresses the question on what is the typical time horizon over which a full transmission of movements in the real exchange rate into real economy takes place. To this end, we base our analysis on the mixed-frequency small-scale dynamic factor model of Siliverstovs (2012) fitted to the...

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 145 indicators and ten types of forecast combination schemes to predict housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. We are interested in whether local business confidence indicators facilitate substantial improvements of the forecasts,...