In this paper, we suggest to estimate the home rents and prices in German regions/cities using the data from Internet ads offering the housing for rent and sale. Given the richness of information contained in the ads, we are able to construct the quality-adjusted rent and price indices using the...

In this paper, we propose an indicator of the homeownership rate based on Internet ads offering the housing for rent and sale. We constructed the HOR estimate using the number of ads in four different markets (flats for rent, flats for sale, houses for rent, and houses for sale). Our HOR...

This paper suggests a novel approach to pre-selection of the component series of the diffusion index based on their individual forecasting performance. It is shown that this targeted selection allows substantially improving the forecasting ability compared to the diffusion index models that are...

In this paper we perform a comparative study of the forecasting properties of the alternative leading indicators for Germany using the growth rates of German real GDP. We use the post-unification data which cover years from 1991 through 2004. We detect a structural break in the growth rates that...

In this paper, we construct a data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities from 24 countries. The data are collected in January - April 2012 from 33 websites, where the advertisements of flats for sale are placed. Using these data we investigate the determinants of the...