Monitoring economic conditions in real time, or nowcasting, is among the key tasks routinely performed by economists. Nowcasting entails some key challenges, which also characterise modern Big Data analytics, often referred to as the three "Vs": the large number of time series continuously...

Monitoring economic conditions in real time, or nowcasting, is among the key tasks routinely performed by economists. Nowcasting entails some key challenges, which also characterise modern Big Data analytics, often referred to as the three "Vs": the large number of time series continuously...

This paper proposes mixed-frequency distributed-lag (MFDL) estimators of impulse response functions (IRFs) in a setup where (i) the shock of interest is observed, (ii) the impact variable of interest is observed at a lower frequency (as a temporally aggregated or sequentially sampled variable),...

This paper proposes mixed-frequency distributed-lag (MFDL) estimators of impulse response functions (IRFs) in a setup where (i) the shock of interest is observed, (ii) the impact variable of interest is observed at a lower frequency (as a temporally aggregated or sequentially sampled variable),...

To simultaneously consider mixed-frequency time series, their joint dynamics, and possible structural changes, we introduce a time-varying parameter mixed-frequency VAR. To keep our approach from becoming too complex, we implement time variation parsimoniously: only the intercepts and a common...

To simultaneously consider mixed-frequency time series, their joint dynamics, and possible structural changes, we introduce a time-varying parameter mixed-frequency VAR. To keep our approach from becoming too complex, we implement time variation parsimoniously: only the intercepts and a common...

Foreign economic activity is a major determinant of export development. This paper presents an indicator for now- and forecasting exports, which is based on survey data that captures foreign economic perspectives. We construct an indicator by weighting foreign PMIs of main trading partners with...

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...

We introduce a high-dimensional structural time series model, where co-movement between the components is due to common factors. A two-step estimation strategy is presented, which is based on principal components in differences in a first step and state space methods in a second step. The...