Journal of Business Cycle Measurement and Analysis

The Swiss Institute for Business Cycle Research regularly conducts business tendency surveys (BTS) amongst manufacturing firms. The information thus generated is available with a publication lead to the official Swiss sales, production, order and inventory statistics. It is shown that the survey data can be used to generate reasonably precise estimates of the reference series with leads of at least one quarter. Specifically, cross-correlations of quarterly series are computed to screen the data for pairs of highly correlated business tendency survey series and corresponding official statistics.