Die vorliegende Bewertung der Treffgenauigkeit von Prognosen sowie von vorläufigen amtlichen Berechnungen zur wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung in Deutschland zeigt, dass frühe Prognosen nicht nur sehr ungenau sind, sondern auch systematisch zu optimistisch ausfallen. Die mehr als ein Jahr im...

Die fortschreitende europäische Integration führt tendenziell zu einer Annäherung der Preise von Gütern und Dienstleistungen. Mit der Erweiterung der EU hat sich dieser Prozess etwas beschleunigt. Der Beitritt der mittel- und osteuropäischen Länder beeinflusst die Preiskonvergenz auf...

Prognosen der konjunkturellen Entwicklung in Deutschland beziehen sich zumeist auf die nationale Ebene. Die Ergebnisse sind jedoch nicht ohne Weiteres auf die regionalen Verhältnisse übertragbar. Ein wichtiger Grund dafür ist, dass die Branchenstrukturen der Regionen mehr oder weniger stark...

This paper sets up a common unobserved factor model with smooth transition autoregressive dynamics. This model is compared to the already classical common factor model with regime-switching. Both models' in-sample and out-of-sample performance in terms of capturing and predicting the business...

Our study represents a first attempt to single out the effects of aging on the entire structure of the economy that is approximated by employment shares in different sectors. We find that even after controlling for the effects of other relevant factors—e.g. income per capita, share of trade in...

The paper evaluates the quality of the German national accounting data (GDP and its use-side components) as measured by the magnitude and dispersion of the forecast/ revision errors. It is demonstrated that government consumption series are the least reliable, whereas real GDP and real private...

This paper examines the cyclical interactions between the remittances of Turkish workers in Germany and output in both Turkey and Germany. Our analysis introduces a new data set covering 1962 to 2004, never used before in the research literature and considered to be a more reliable source than...

In this paper we perform a comparative study of the forecasting properties of the about 30 alternative leading indicators for Germany using the growth rates of German real GDP. In addition to them, we have constructed a diffusion index based on the principal component analysis and including 145...

In this paper, we compare the distribution of price changes between collusive and noncollusive periods for ten major cartels. The first moments focus on previous research. We extend the discussion to the third (skewness) and fourth (kurtosis) moments. However, none of the above descriptive...

The Google Insights data are a collection of recorded Internet searches for a huge number of the keywords, which are available since January 2004. These searches represent a kind of revealed perceptions of Internet users, which are a (possibly not entirely representative) sample of the general...