Über die Zukunft wissen wir nichts. Keynes’ Diktum gilt weiterhin, obschon wir vielfältigst prognostizieren. Dabei aber rekurrieren wir systematisch und statistisch auf alte Datenmuster und Erinnerungen. Erfahrungen bilden ...

We study the role of global media during the Greek debt crisis and relate it to the transmission of events on financial actors' expectations. To identify news coverage about the Greek debt crisis, we apply topic modeling ...

This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. We compile a new database of 220,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) ...

The paper reports results of a survey among active forecasters of the German business cycle. Relying on 82 respondents from 37 different institutions, we investigate what models and theories forecasters subscribe to and ...

We assess empirically whether monetary policy announcements impact firm expectations. Two features of our data set are key. First, we rely on a Survey of production and price expectations of German firms, that is, expectations ...

Economists have long argued that introducing social insurance will reduce fertility. The hypothesis relies on standard models: if children are desirable in part because they provide security in case of disability or old ...

Economists stress the leading role that inclusive institutions play among the various factors that foster a country’s economic growth. In this article, we show that it might be misleading to mistake the codification of a ...

We study the ownership structure of joint-stock firms for the period of 1869 to 1945 based on a unique hand-collected data set. The data covers a selection of 785 general meetings of 276 firms, including details of more ...

A regime shift towards increased in inflation expectations is credited with jumpstarting the recovery from the Great Depression in the United States. Germany experienced a recovery as fast and strong in the 1930s. What ...