We analyze four economic sentiment indicators for the German economy regarding their ability to forecast economic activity. Using cross correlations and Granger causality tests we find that the ifo business expectations (ifo), the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) and the ZEW Indicator of Economic...

This paper studies the information content of some Ifo indicators. In particular, we investigate whether two Ifo indicators, one on the current business situation, the other on current production development, provide information on revisions of German industrial production. A new feature of our...

In this paper we propose a new bootstrap, or Monte-Carlo, approach to such problems. Traditional bootstrap methods in this context are based on fitting a process chosen from a wide but relatively conventional range of discrete time series models, including autoregressions, moving averages,...

In this paper the accuracy of a wide range of German business cycle forecasters is assessed for the past 10 years. For this purpose, a data set is used comprising forecasts published on a monthly basis by Consensus Economics. The application of several descriptive as well as statistical measures...

This paper proposes a methodology for building Multivariate Time-Varying STCC-GARCH models. The novel contributions in this area are the specification tests related to the correlation component, the extension of the general model to allow for additional correlation regimes, and a detailed...

This paper introduces a new approach to modelling the conditional variance in a multivariate setting. It is essentially a combination of the popular GARCH model class with a spatial component, inspired by generalized space-time models. The resulting spatial GARCH model takes into account both...