Expectations form the basis of economic decisions of market participants in an uncertain world. Sentiment indicators reflect those expectations and thus have a proven track record for predicting economic variables. However, respondents of surveys perceive the world to a large extent with the...

In an uncertain world, decisions by market participants are based on expectations. Thus, sentiment indicators reflecting expectations are proven at predicting economic variables. However, survey respondents largely perceive the world through media reports. Typically, crude media information,...

Concerns about global warming and growing scarcity of fossile fuels require substantial changes in energy consumption patterns and energy systems, as targeted by many countries around the world. One key element to achieve such transformation is to increase energy efficiency of the housing stock....

Der Beitrag liefert einen kurzen Überblick über alternative Methoden der Bestimmung von Konjunkturzyklen - die Ermittlung auf Grundlage vor-, gleich- und nachlaufender Zeitreihen gesamtwirtschaftlicher Variablen sowie die Zerlegung in Trend- und Zykluskomponenten mittels ökonometrischer...

Vorhersagen der konjunkturellen Entwicklung werden in Deutschland meist für die Ebene der Gesamtwirtschaft durchgeführt. Sie sind jedoch nicht auf die regionalen Verhältnisse übertragbar. Signifikante Abweichungen können sich unter anderem wegen einer unterschiedlichen Sektoralstruktur...

We assess the contribution of macroeconomic uncertainty

The surge in the German house prices starting in 2010 raised fears about the emergence of a speculative bubble. Given a local nature of housing markets, it is not clear to what extent the bubble, if any, is spread across different cities. In this paper, we test for speculative house price...

In this paper, the authors construct a unique data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities from 24 countries. The data are collected between January and May 2012 from 33 websites, where the advertisements of flats for sale are placed. Using the resulting sample of...

Before the World War I, the urban rental housing market in Germany could be described as a free and competitive market. The government hardly interfered in the relationships between the landlords and ten- ants. The rents were set freely. During the World War I, the market was hit by several...

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 145 indicators and ten types of forecast combination schemes to predict housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. We are interested in whether local business confidence indicators facilitate substantial improvements of the forecasts,...