In socio-economic sciences the RePEc network (Research Papers in Economics) has become an essential source both for the spread of existing and new economic research. Furthermore the calculation of rankings for authors and academic institutions play a central role. We provide some cautionary...

It is well-known that nonresponse affects the results of surveys and can even causebias due to selectivities if it cannot be regarded as missing at random. In contrast tohousehold surveys, response behaviour in business surveys has been examined rarely inthe literature. This paper is one of the...

Business cycle indicators based on the balance statistics are a widely used method tomonitor the actual economic situation. In contrast to official data, indicators frombusiness surveys are early available and typically not revised after their first publication.But as surveys can be in general...

This paper compares the German Gross Domestic Product between 1991 and 2008 with the Ifo business indicators. Because GDP is published quarterly but the Ifo indicators monthly, the most analyses compare these variables by merging the indicators to quarterly data. In this paper an alternative way...

With the world-wide spread of the internet in the 1990s, the conduction of web or e-mailsurveys became popular in research. Although these surveys provide fast data collectionand reduced costs, results may suffer from biases due to the survey mode. While a varietyof studies concerning mode...

The Ifo Institute for Economic Research has been conducting regular business surveyssince its foundation in 1949. The most well-known of Ifo's surveys is the Ifo BusinessSurvey (ifo Konjunkturtest). The micro data of the Ifo Business Survey are accessible toexternal researchers on-site at Ifo as...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the trade potential of the fifteen old EU countries with the ten new members having joined on May 1st, 2004. Our focus lies not so much on the integration process already having taken place, but on the importance of institutional factors for trade....

Das ifo Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung in München führt seit seiner Gründung im Jahr1949 regelmäßige Unternehmensbefragungen durch. Bisher bestand kein institutionalisierterDatenzugang zu den Mikrodaten für Forscher außerhalb des Institutes. Die Mikrodatenwerden nunmehr im ifo...

Different studies provide surprisingly a large variety of controversial conclusions aboutthe forecasting power of an indicator, even when it is supposed to forecast the sametime series. In this study we aim to provide a thorough overview of linear forecastingtechniques and draw conclusions...