This technical report explains in more detail the implementation of the plasticity model as well as the virtual node and cutting algorithms used in the paper ’Unified Simulation of Elastic Rods, Shells and Solids’ [Martin et al. 2010].

We investigate the information content of business tendency surveys for key macroeconomic variables in Switzerland. To summarise the information of a large data set of sectoral business tendency surveys we extract a small number of common factors by a principal components estimator. The estimator is able to deal with mixed-frequency data and missing observations at the beginning and end of the sample period. We show that these survey-based ...