Cycles in the behavior of stock markets have been widely documented. There is an increasing body of literature on whether stock markets anticipate business cycles or its turning points. Several recent studies assert that financial integration impacts positively on business cycle comovements of...

While it is painfully clear that the 'ever closer' monetary and financial union in the EU has run into serious trouble there has been very little study of the degree to which the countries have become similar or different in their economic growth dynamics. This paper therefore goes beyond the...

In this paper the accuracy of a wide range of German business cycle forecasters is assessed for the past 10 years. For this purpose, a data set is used comprising forecasts published on a monthly basis by Consensus Economics. The application of several descriptive as well as statistical measures...

In this paper we analyze the macroeconomic forecasts of the Consensus Forecasts for 12 countries over the period from 1996 to 2006 regarding bias and information efficiency. A pooled approach is employed which permits the evaluation of all forecasts for each target variable over 24 horizons...

Optimal monetary policy studies typically rely on a single structural model and identification of model-specific rules that minimize the unconditional volatilities of inflation and real activity. In our proposed approach, we take a large set of structural models and look for the model-robust...

We analyze a corpus of 564 business cycle forecast reports for the German economy. The dataset covers nine institutions and 27 years. From the entire reports we select the parts that refer exclusively to the forecast of the German economy. Sentiment and frequency analysis confirm that the mode...

We offer a contribution to the analysis of optimal monetary policy. The standard approach to determine what policy rule a central bank should follow is to take a single structural model and minimize the unconditional volatilities of inflation and real activity. In this paper, we propose monetary...

Optimal monetary policy studies typically rely on a single structural model and identification of model-specific rules that minimize the unconditional volatilities of inflation and real activity. In our proposed approach, we take a large set of structural models and look for the model-robust...

This paper presents a method to conduct early estimates of GDP growth in Germany. We employ MIDAS regressions to circumvent the mixed frequency problem and use pooling techniques to summarize efficiently the information content of the various indicators. More specifically, we investigate whether...

In this paper we analyze the power of various indicators to predict growth rates of aggregate production using real-time data. In addition, we assess their ability to predict turning points of the economy. We consider four groups of indicators: survey data, composite indicators, real economic...