Volume 238, Issue 6 -

This study compares industrial production and gross value added in volume terms in the euro area and euro area countries, because real GDP growth signals from industrial production growth might be misleading and earlier released industrial production growth is not one-to-one translated into industrial value added growth. This is an important issue for analysts and policy makers, because industrial production is a standard element in tools for nowcasting real GDP in real time. It also raises the question about the factors explaining these differences. Differences in terms of (changes in) quarterly growth between production and gross value added include sign reversals and can last for consecutive quarters. Persistent level differences might also exist. The explanatory factors for these differences are the treatment of prices, seasonality and coverage. Data limitations prevent a detailed analysis of the price factor, but the other two factors are more closely evaluated. It turns out that the relative importance of these factors varies over time and thus is difficult to assess ex ante for a specific quarter. A remedy is that statisticians further harmonize national accounts and short-term statistics as well as national practices for seasonal adjustment.

Housing property is the most important position in a household’s wealth portfolio. Even though there is strong evidence that house price cycles and saving patterns behave synchronously, the underlying causes remain controversial. The present paper examines if there is a wealth effect of house prices on savings using household-level panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1996-2012. We find that young homeowners decrease their savings in response to unanticipated house price shocks, whereas old households hardly respond to house price changes. Although effects are relatively low in magnitude, we interpret this as evidence of a housing wealth effect.

We propose a new method for solving nonlinear dynamic tracking games using a meta-heuristic approach. In contrast to ‘traditional’ methods based on linear-quadratic (LQ) techniques, this derivative-free method is very flexible with regard to the objective function specification. The proposed method is applied to a three-player dynamic game and tested versus a derivative-dependent method in approximating solutions of different game specifications. In particular, we consider a dynamic game between fiscal (played by national governments) and monetary policy (played by a central bank) in a monetary union. Apart from replicating results of the LQ-based techniques in a standard setting, we solve two ‘non-standard’ extensions of this game (dealing with an inequality constraint in a control variable and introducing asymmetry in penalties of the objective function), identifying both a cooperative Pareto and a non-cooperative open-loop Nash equilibria, where the traditional methods are not applicable. We, thus, demonstrate that the proposed method allows one to study more realistic problems and gain better insights for economic policy.

Dieser Beitrag skizziert vor dem Hintergrund der Diskussionen um den Aufbau einer nationalen Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) in Deutschland die Arbeitsweise und Merkmale des Rats für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsdaten (RatSWD). Im Mittelpunkt stehen die zwei zentralen Merkmale des RatSWD als unabhängiges Beratungsgremium von Datenproduzenten und wissenschaftlichen Datennutzenden einerseits und als organisatorischer Rahmen für ein dezentrales Netzwerk aus derzeit 31 akkreditierten Forschungsdatenzentren (FDZ) andererseits. Der RatSWD bildet damit den Rahmen für eine nutzergetriebene, nach außen sprechfähige und leistungsfähige, koordinierte Forschungsdateninfrastruktur in den Sozial-, Verhaltens- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften. Die Forschungsdateninfrastruktur der Sozial-, Verhaltens- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften ist als bundesweites, verteiltes und wachsendes Netzwerk arbeitsteilig angelegt. Das Netzwerk koordiniert disziplinübergreifend die Archivierung und Bereitstellung einer Vielfalt von Forschungsdaten, befördert institutionellen Wissensaustausch und erarbeitet gemeinsame Standards. Der RatSWD widmet sich der Öffnung von weiteren Datenschätzen aus Verwaltung, Forschung und Wirtschaft für die unabhängige Wissenschaft und entwickelt übergeordnete Standards zu Themen wie Datenschutz, Forschungsethik und nachhaltiger Förderpolitik. Den empirisch Forschenden stehen dadurch eine Interessenvertretung nach außen sowie ein stetig wachsendes Angebot an qualitativ hochwertigen Datensätzen zur Verfügung.