We suggest to use Internet car sale price advertisements for measuring economic inequality between and within German regions. Our estimates of regional income levels and Gini indices based on advertisements are highly, positively correlated with the official figures. This implies that the...

Survey-based indicators such as the consumer confidence are widely seen as leading indicators for economic activity, especially for the future path of private consumption. Although they receive high attention in the media, their forecasting power appears to be very limited. Therefore, this paper...

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 115 indicators to predict the housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. Above all, we are interested in whether the local business confidence indicators can allow substantially improving the forecasts, given the local nature of the...

Die Kaufpreise für Eigentumswohnungen sind seit Beginn des Jahres 2010 um durchschnittlich sechs Prozent gegenüber dem jeweiligen Vorjahresquartal gestiegen. Die Wachstumsraten der Mietpreise haben mit vier Prozent deutlich weniger zugenommen, liegen aber ebenfalls oberhalb der allgemeinen...

Das Platzen von spekulativen Preisblasen an den Immobilienmärkten führt oft zu realwirtschaftlichen Verwerfungen, die mit hohen Produktions- und Beschäftigungsverlusten verbunden sind. In diesem Beitrag wird diskutiert, inwieweit institutionelle Rahmenbedingungen das Entstehen und die...

In this paper, the authors construct country-specific chronologies of house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1–2009:Q4. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of fundamental and filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one...