We test for state-dependent bias in the European Central Bank's inflation projections. We show that the ECB tends to underpredict when the observed inflation rate at the time of forecasting is higher than an estimated threshold of 1.8%. The bias is most pronounced at intermediate forecasting...

We use a novel data set covering all domestic debit card transactions in physical terminals by Norwegian households, to nowcast quarterly Norwegian household consumption. These card payments data are free of sampling errors and are available weekly without delays, providing a valuable early...

We test for bias and efficiency of the ECB inflation forecasts using a confidential dataset of ECB macroeconomic quarterly projections. We investigate whether the properties of the forecasts depend on the level of inflation, by distinguishing whether the inflation observed by the ECB at the time...

We present a first assessment of the predictive ability of machine learning methods for inflation forecasting in Costa Rica. We compute forecasts using two variants of k-nearest neighbors, random forests, extreme gradient boosting and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. We evaluate their...

Despite the driving role of economic growth, SMEs in Vietnam have dealt with many critical constraints relating to insufficiency of internal financing sources and inaccessibility of external funds arising from the crisis period. Based on the unique dataset of Vietnam's SMEs covering the period...

The study investigates the existence and extent of information rigidity in inflation forecasts among 25 developed and 18 developing economies during 2002-2017 period utilizing a survey data set never explored before on this issue. In general, the study finds some evidence of information...

Economy-wide models are an important tool used by fiscal authorities and central banks to support the provision of sound assessment of the economic outlook. The Treasury Macroeconometric Model of Australia ("EMMA") is a framework to support macroeconomic forecasting, and counterfactual policy...

Using a unique dataset of 22.5 million news articles from the Dow Jones Newswires Archive, we perform an in depth real-time out-of-sample forecasting comparison study with one of the most widely used data sets in the newer forecasting literature, namely the FRED-MD dataset. Focusing on U.S. GDP,...

The positive relationship between real exchange rates and natural resource income is well understood and studied. However, climate change and the transition to a lower-carbon economy now challenges this relationship. We document this by proposing a novel news media-based measure of climate...

Economy-wide models are an important tool used by fiscal authorities and central banks to support the provision of sound assessment of the economic outlook. The Treasury Macroeconometric Model of Australia ("EMMA") is a framework to support macroeconomic forecasting, and counterfactual policy...