Business Cycles and Surveys

CIRET (Centre for International Research on Economic Tendency Surveys) is a scientific association for the study of economic cycles and surveys.

The conference was opened by Rupert Sausgruber (Rector of WU Vienna), Gabriel Felbermayr (WIFO Director) and Jan-Egbert Sturm (CIRET, KOF, ETH Zurich). Ana Galvao (Bloomberg Economics, London) then presented her latest research findings on the effect of surprises on interest rates and risk premiums of government bonds in the first keynote speech "Economic Data News and Financial Markets".

The second keynote speech was given by Peter Klimek (ASCII and Complexity Science Hub) entitled "Mapping and Analyzing Supply Networks: From Firm-Level Dependencies to Global Food Supply Shocks".

The third keynote speaker, Massimiliano Marcellino (Bocconi University, Milan), spoke on "Predicting Tail-Risks for the Italian Economy". He was awarded the Kerstenetzky Scholarly Achievement Award initiated by the Brazilian Fundação Getulio Vargas Isaac for his life's work, in particular for his macroeconometric methodological work.

The Best Paper Award was given to Anja Sebbesen (WIFO) for her co-authored paper with Birgit Meyer entitled "I Think What you Think: Trade Fairs and the Exchange of firms' Beliefs".

Lara Zarges (ifo Institute, Munich) received the Young Researcher Award for her publication co-authored with Friederike Fourné "Identifying a macroeconomic shock using firm-level data: An application to the German manufacturing sector".

WIFO contributed four conference papers and took part in a workshop on "Impact of inflation on macroeconomic measurement and analysis", which was organised together with the United Nations Statistics Division.

The conference was closed in an impressive atmosphere at the "Fuhrgassl-Huber" wine tavern, where the conference participants got to know the Viennese wine tavern culture.

More information on the programme can be found here.