While recurring and regular variations of weather conditions are implicitly addressed by standard seasonal adjustment procedures of economic time series, extraordinary weather outcomes are not. We analyze their impact on German total industrial and construction-sector production and find modest...

Up until now, the concept of compression in single- or multivariate regressions has been limited to the common-frequency case. Having an application of macroeconomic forecasting in mind, one inevitably has to deal with variables sampled at various frequencies. Consequently, this work attempts to...

Short answer: It helps a lot when other important variables are excluded from the information set. Longer answer: We revisit claims in the literature that money growth is Granger-causal for inflation at low frequencies. Applying frequency-specific tests in a comprehensive system setup for...

The detection of business-cycle turning points is usually performed with non-linear discrete-regime models such as binary dependent variable (e.g., probit or logit) or Markov-switching methods. The probit model has the drawback that the continuous underlying target variable is discretized, with...

While recurring and regular variations of weather conditions are implicitly addressed by standard seasonal adjustment procedures of economic time series, extraordinary weather outcomes are not. We propose a way of measuring aggregate abnormal weather conditions based on available local...

For the timely detection of business-cycle turning points we suggest to use mediumsized linear systems (subset VARs with automated zero restrictions) to forecast the relevant underlying variables, and to derive the probability of the turning point from the forecast density as the probability...

The authors analyse the macroeconomic impact of the French work-sharing reform of 2000 (a reduction of standard working hours in combination with wage subsidies). Using a vector error correction model (VECM) for several labour market variables as well as inflation and output the authors produce...