This paper looks into the 'fine print' of boosting for economic forecasting. By using German industrial production for the period from 1996 to 2014 and a data set consisting of 175 monthly indicators, we evaluate which indicators get selected by the boosting algorithm over time and four...

An ongoing debate in the literature on efficiency of higher education institutions concerns the indicator for research output in the empirical analysis. While several studies chose to use the number of publications, others rely on the overall amount of research grants. The present study...

In research into higher education, the evaluation of completion and dropout rates has generated a steady stream of interest for decades. While most studies only calculate quotes using student and graduate numbers for both phenomena, we propose to also consider the budget available to...

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

In this paper we present the Ifo Investment Database, which provides annual investment data for 12 investment assets in 50 German industries from 1991 onward. The data is consistent with national accounts statistics provided by the German Federal Statistical Office and is based on investments in...

This study identifies day-of-the-week effects in business surveys using monthly data from the ifo Institute. The odds are higher that companies are more likely to exhibit more pessimistic business expectations for the upcoming months on Mondays and more optimistic expectations at the end of the...