“…• As other macroeconomic variables, I include (following (Behrens et al 2018b(Behrens et al , 2018c(Behrens et al , 2019Döpke et al 2017), who study German GDP and inflation forecasts): German industrial orders, German consumer and producer price indices, industrial production for Germany, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Netherlands as leading indicators for Germany's main trading partners (Guichard and Rusticelli 2011), as well as the oil price, German business tendency surveys for manufacturing (current and future tendency; on macroeconomic survey data as predictors, see (Frale et al 2010; Lehmann 2015)), finally, I include the OECD leading indicator for Germany as a composite indicator .…”