Das ifo Geschäftsklima für die gewerbliche Wirtschaft gilt seit vielen Jahren als der wichtigste Indikator für die Konjunkturentwicklung in Deutschland. Es ist als Mittelwert der beiden Komponenten Geschäftslage und Geschäftserwartungen für die nächsten sechs Monate definiert. Seit 1993...

To match the NBER business cycle features it is necessary to employ Generalised Dynamic Categorical (GDC) models that impose certain phase restrictions and permit multiple indexes. Theory suggests additional shape restrictions in the form of monotonicity and boundedness of certain transition...

We investigate asymmetries in the conditional mean dynamics of four sectors of the U.S. GDP data. Since the statistical evidence on nonlinearities in the conditional mean could be influenced by the presence of outliers, or by a failure to model conditional heteroskedasticity, we explicitly...

This paper merges two specifications developed recently in the forecasting literature: the MS-MIDAS model introduced by Gu´erin and Marcellino [2011] and the MIDAS-factor model considered in Marcellino and Schumacher [2010]. The MS-factor MIDAS model (MS-FaMIDAS) that we introduce incorporates...

A “stalling” economy has been defined as one that experiences a discrete deterioration in economic performance following a decline in its growth rate to below some threshold level. Previous efforts to identify stalls have focused primarily on the US economy, with the threshold level being...

An updated version of our Markov-switching model of U.S. real GDP clearly suggests the COVID-19 recession was more U shaped than L shaped. As with linear time series models, it is important to account for extreme outliers during the pandemic, but a simple decay function for volatility from...

The existence of fluctuations is part of the narrative, especially when there is a slowdown (or worse, a contraction) in economic activity. The presence of long waves with a period of about 50 years as proposed by Kondratieff is one of the most controversial and fascinating theories about...

We study the role of sentiment variables as predictors for US recessions. We combine sentiment variables with either classical recession predictors or common factors based on a large panel of macroeconomic and financial variables. Sentiment variables hold vast predictive power for US recessions...

Recent work by Hamilton, Waggoner and Zha (2004) has demonstrated the importance of identification and normalization in econometric models. In this paper, we use the popular class of two-state Markov switching models to illustrate the consequences of alternative identification schemes for...

This paper introduces a Markov-switching model in which transition probabilities depend on higher frequency indicators and their lags through polynomial weighting schemes. The MSV-MIDAS model is estimated via maximum likelihood (ML) methods. The estimation relies on a slightly modified version...