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This paper investigates the effects of media coverage and macroeconomic conditions on inflation forecast disagreement of German households and professional forecasters. We adopt a Bayesian learning model in which media coverage of inflation affects forecast disagreement by influencing information sets as well as predictor choice. Our empirical results show that disagreement of households depends on the content of news stories (tone) but is unaffected by reporting intensity (volume) and by the heterogeneity of story content (information entropy). Disagreement of professionals does not depend on media coverage. With respect to the influence of macroeconomic variables we provide evidence that disagreement of households and professionals primarily depends on the current rate of inflation., KOF Working Papers, 223

This paper investigates how economic conditions are associated with age-sex group specific suicide rates in a panel of 28 OECD countries over the period 1980-2002. We consider the trend and cyclical components of income, unemployment, income inequality, inflation, as well as various socio-demographic control variables. Results depend on whether stationarity properties are adequately accommodated or not. Estimating models in first differences we find that the cyclical component of income is negatively associated with suicide rates of men, while suicide rates of women are primarily affected by unemployment. Moreover, our estimations show that the effects of the cyclical component of income and unemployment are most pronounced in OECD countries with low public social security spending., KOF Working Papers, 207