Based on a panel of German professional forecasts for 1970 to 2003 we find that growth and inflation forecasts are unbiased and weakly, but not strongly efficient. Besides the effect of diverging forecasting dates, no other substantial differences in forecasting quality are found among...

Obgleich es zahlreiche Institutionen gibt, die das deutsche Bruttoinlandsprodukt vorhersagen, mangelt es aktuell an sogenannten "Nowcasting"-Modellen, deren Prognosegüte mit jedem neu verfügbaren, das deutsche Bruttoinlandsprodukt beeinflussenden Datenpunkt verbessert wird. In der folgenden...

We analyze four economic sentiment indicators for the German economy regarding their ability to forecast economic activity. Using cross correlations and Granger causality tests we find that the ifo business expectations (ifo), the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) and the ZEW Indicator of Economic...

This paper studies the information content of some Ifo indicators. In particular, we investigate whether two Ifo indicators, one on the current business situation, the other on current production development, provide information on revisions of German industrial production. A new feature of our...