Category: Forecasting

Toll Index August 2025

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The Toll Index was first proposed in IZA DP5522 which was published in the Journal of Forecasting. It has been widely covered in national and international media (selection):


Focus Magazin,
Tim Harford – The undercover economist,
Financial Times,
MoneyWeek,
WirtschaftsWoche,
CNN International,
DRS3 Swiss public radio,
Deutsche Welle.

The Toll index was redefined in 2024 to account for various toll-related policy changes like including lighter trucks in the system or adding roads to the toll road network.

Citation: “Nowcasting business cycles using toll data.” Journal of Forecasting 32:4 (2013): 299–306(with K. F. Zimmermann).

Toll Index July 2025

Posted on

The Toll Index was first proposed in IZA DP5522 which was published in the Journal of Forecasting. It has been widely covered in national and international media (selection):


Focus Magazin,
Tim Harford – The undercover economist,
Financial Times,
MoneyWeek,
WirtschaftsWoche,
CNN International,
DRS3 Swiss public radio,
Deutsche Welle.

The Toll index was redefined in 2024 to account for various toll-related policy changes like including lighter trucks in the system or adding roads to the toll road network.

Citation: “Nowcasting business cycles using toll data.” Journal of Forecasting 32:4 (2013): 299–306(with K. F. Zimmermann).

Notes on a World with Generative AI

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Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) are moving into domains once seen as uniquely human—reasoning, synthesis, abstraction, and rhetoric. Addressed to (labor) economists and informed readers, this paper clarifies what is truly new about LLMs, what is not, and why it matters. Using an analogy to autoregressive models from economics, we explain their stochastic nature, whose fluency is often mistaken for agency. We situate LLMs in the longer history of human–machine outsourcing, from digestion to cognition, and examine disruptive effects on white-collar labor, institutions, and epistemic norms. Risks emerge when synthetic content becomes both product and input, creating feedback loops that erode originality and reliability. Grounding the discussion in conceptual clarity over hype, we argue that while GenAI may substitute for some labor, statistical limits will preserve a key role for human judgment. The question is not only how these tools are used, but which tasks we relinquish and how we reallocate expertise in a new division of cognitive labor.

Paper (Ifo series): https://www.ifo.de/en/cesifo/publications/2025/working-paper/notes-world-generative-ai

Toll Index June 2025

Posted on

The Toll Index was first proposed in IZA DP5522 which was published in the Journal of Forecasting. It has been widely covered in national and international media (selection):


Focus Magazin,
Tim Harford – The undercover economist,
Financial Times,
MoneyWeek,
WirtschaftsWoche,
CNN International,
DRS3 Swiss public radio,
Deutsche Welle.

The Toll index was redefined in 2024 to account for various toll-related policy changes like including lighter trucks in the system or adding roads to the toll road network.

Citation: “Nowcasting business cycles using toll data.” Journal of Forecasting 32:4 (2013): 299–306(with K. F. Zimmermann).

Toll Index May 2025

Posted on

The Toll Index was first proposed in IZA DP5522 which was published in the Journal of Forecasting. It has been widely covered in national and international media (selection):


Focus Magazin,
Tim Harford – The undercover economist,
Financial Times,
MoneyWeek,
WirtschaftsWoche,
CNN International,
DRS3 Swiss public radio,
Deutsche Welle.

The Toll index was redefined in 2024 to account for various toll-related policy changes like including lighter trucks in the system or adding roads to the toll road network.

Citation: “Nowcasting business cycles using toll data.” Journal of Forecasting 32:4 (2013): 299–306(with K. F. Zimmermann).

Toll Index April 2025

Posted on

The Toll Index was first proposed in IZA DP5522 which was published in the Journal of Forecasting. It has been widely covered in national and international media (selection):


Focus Magazin,
Tim Harford – The undercover economist,
Financial Times,
MoneyWeek,
WirtschaftsWoche,
CNN International,
DRS3 Swiss public radio,
Deutsche Welle.

The Toll index was redefined in 2024 to account for various toll-related policy changes like including lighter trucks in the system or adding roads to the toll road network.

Citation: “Nowcasting business cycles using toll data.” Journal of Forecasting 32:4 (2013): 299–306(with K. F. Zimmermann).

Toll Index February 2025

Posted on

The Toll Index was first proposed in IZA DP5522 which was published in the Journal of Forecasting. It has been widely covered in national and international media (selection):


Focus Magazin,
Tim Harford – The undercover economist,
Financial Times,
MoneyWeek,
WirtschaftsWoche,
CNN International,
DRS3 Swiss public radio,
Deutsche Welle.

The Toll index was redefined in 2024 to account for various toll-related policy changes like including lighter trucks in the system or adding roads to the toll road network.

Citation: “Nowcasting business cycles using toll data.” Journal of Forecasting 32:4 (2013): 299–306(with K. F. Zimmermann).