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...

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...

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...

It is well-known that the distribution of citations to articles in a journal is skewed. We ask whether journal rankings based on the impact factor are robust with respect to this fact. We exclude the most cited paper, the top 5 and 10 cited papers for 100 economics journals and recalculate the...

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...

Die Analyse und Prognose regionaler Konjunkturzyklen gewinnt immer mehr an Bedeutung. Bisher liegt aber keine kohärente Beschreibung und Analyse regionaler Konjunkturzyklen für die 16 Bundesländer in Deutschland vor. In einer dreiteiligen Reihe im ifo Schnelldienst wird beschrieben, wie...

Nachdem im ersten Teil der Artikelserie die Datenlage im Mittelpunkt stand, analysiert der vorliegende Aufsatz mit Hilfe der Umsatzdaten der Industrie den Konjunkturzyklus in den deutschen Bundesländern. Zunächst werden verschiedene in der Literatur übliche Ansätze zur Definition eines...