Tracking the German Business Cycle

The German economy is an important economic driver in the Euro-area in terms of gross domestic product, labour force and international integration. We provide a state of the art estimate of the German output gap between 1995 and 2021 and present a nowcasting scheme that accurately predicts the Germa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:MAGKS - Joint Discussion Paper Series in Economics (Band 12-2022)
Main Authors: Berger, Tino, Ochsner, Christian
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Philipps-Universität Marburg 2022
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Online Access:PDF Full Text
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Summary:The German economy is an important economic driver in the Euro-area in terms of gross domestic product, labour force and international integration. We provide a state of the art estimate of the German output gap between 1995 and 2021 and present a nowcasting scheme that accurately predicts the Germany output gap up to three months prior to a gross domestic product data release. To this end, we elicit a mixed-frequency vector-autoregressive model in the spirit of Berger, Morley, and Wong (forthcoming) who propose to use monthly information to form an expectation about the current-quarter output gap. The mean absolute error of our nowcast is very small (0.25 percentage points) after only one month of observed data. Moreover, we show that international trade and labour market aggregates consistently explain large shares of variation in the German output gap.
Physical Description:28 Pages
ISSN:1867-3678
DOI:10.17192/es2024.0721