Das Produktionspotenzial ist eine wichtige makroökonomische Indikatorvariable. Die Abweichung der Produktion vom Produktionspotenzial, die Produktionslücke, dient der Einschätzung der konjunkturellen Lage und als Indikator für Inflations- oder Deflationsrisiken. Wie sicher kann die...

This paper investigates the Euro-area business cycle using a multivariate autoregressive time series model with cointegration. The cointegration restrictions help to identify permanent and transitory shocks which form the stochastic part of trend and cyclical GDP, respectively. The...

Mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) regressions allow to estimate dynamic equations that explain a low-frequency variable by high-frequency variables and their lags. To account for temporal instabilities in this relationship, this paper discusses an extension to MIDAS with time-varying parameters, which...

This paper compares two single-equation approaches from the recent nowcast literature: Mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) regressions and bridge equations. Both approach are used to nowcast a low-frequency variable such as quarterly GDP growth by higher-frequency business cycle indicators. Three...

The analysis of large panel data sets (with N variables) involves methods of dimension reduction and optimal information extraction. Dimension reduction is usually achieved by extracting the common variation in the data into few factors (k, where k N). In the present project, factors are...

This paper discusses a large-scale factor model for the German economy. Following the recent literature, a data set of 121 time series is used via principal component analysis to determine the factors, which enter a dynamic model for German GDP. The model is compared with alternative univariate...