In April, sceptical economic assessments continued to prevail. By sector, the deterioration was particularly evident in services and retail trade. In manufacturing, economic assessments improved but remained at a low level. Compared with the previous quarter, uncertainty rose particularly in...

Bond yield and retail interest rate spreads are presumed to lead real activity on the basis of financial accelerator mechanisms, markup cyclicality or simply because they are forward-looking. Empirical results for Austria show that retail rate spreads outperform many other indicators in this...

This paper proposes a new model-based method to obtain a coincident indicator for the business cycle. A dynamic factor model with trend components and a common cycle component is considered which can be estimated using standard maximum likelihood methods. The multivariate unobserved components...