The recognition of the key importance of economic stability after World War I sparked interest in business forecasting on both sides of the Atlantic. This article explores the creation and the rapid international and ...

I analyze the joint efficiency of export and import forecasts by leading economic research institutes for the years 1970 to 2017 for Germany in a multivariate setting. To this end, I compute, in a first step, multivariate ...

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) ...

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 ...

Official (government-to-government) lending is much larger than commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border capital flows, especially during disasters such as wars, financial crises and natural catastrophes. ...

We show how elite capture affects optimal debt repatriations and management of official reserves under capital controls, bridging literature on debt buybacks and secondary markets. The model we provide guides our study of ...

Based on a new survey of German households, we investigate the role of information channels and lifetime experience for households’ inflation expectations. We show that the types of information channels that households ...

Using corpora of business cycle report sections dealing with monetary and fiscal policy issues from 1999 to 2017 and using methods of unsupervised text scaling (Slapin and Proksch, 2008; Lauderdale and Herzog, 2016), ...

We study the efficiency of growth and inflation forecasts published by three leading German economic research institutes during a period of time ranging from 1970 to 2017. To this end, we examine whether the information ...

Based on German business cycle forecast reports covering 10 German institutions for the period 1993–2017, the paper analyses the information content of German forecasters’ narratives for German business cycle forecasts. ...