Dealing with the consequences of climate change will put an increasing burden on public and private finances. We use the example of floods in a survey experiment among 8,000 German households to elicit households' preferences for climate adaptation policies. In Germany, as in many countries, we...

This paper examines the anchoring of inflation expectations in the euro area based on data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). The analysis shows that the overall distribution of medium- and long-term inflation forecasts has changed considerably following the global financial...

Fiscal rules are a frequent policy measure to restrict deficit-taking among incumbent politicians. In times of increased and sustained investment needs to mitigate the consequences of climate change, and to promote the digital and structural transformation, fiscal rules have become subject to...

This article sheds light on the impact of the media on economists' expectations for future economic developments. We conducted a worldwide economic expert survey and find that the media provides most economists with valuable information that influences their expectations. This applies...

This paper investigates whether localization economies as brought forward by Marshall(1890) or urbanization economies as mentioned by Jacobs (1970) are more decisive forregional gross value added per capita. Our novel approach is to explicitly allow forinterdependencies between these two...

In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to forecast gross value-added (GVA) and its sectoral subcomponents at the regional level. With an autoregressive distributed lagmodel we forecast total and sectoral GVA for one German state (Saxony) with more than 300 indicators from different...

In this paper we evaluate the forecasting performance of employmentexpectations for employment growth in 15 European states. Our data coverthe period from the first quarter 1998 to the fourth quarter 2012. With in-sampleanalyses and pseudo out-of-sample exercises, we find that for most of the...

In this study, we evaluate whether survey-based indicators produce lower forecast errorsfor export growth than indicators obtained from hard data such as price and costcompetitiveness measures. Our pseudo out-of-sample analyses and forecastencompassingtests reveal that survey-based indicators...

Solid budgets serve as important quality signals for the electorate. Politicians mighttherefore face an incentive to influence tax revenue forecasts, which are widely regardedas a key element for budget setups. Looking at the time period from 1996 to 2012, inthis study we systematically analyze...

Globalization has led to huge increases in import volumes, increasing the importance of imports for total output. Since imports are a volatile component, they are difficult to forecast and strongly influence the forecast accuracy of gross domestic product. We introduce the first leading...