This paper aims at providing a detailed analysis of the leading indicator properties of corporate bond spreads for real economic activity in the euro area. In- and out-of-sample predictive content of corporate bond spreads are examined along three dimensions: the bonds' quality, their term to...

This study develops a new monthly euro Area‐wide Leading Indicator (ALI) for the euro area business cycle. It derives the composite ALI by applying a deviation cycle methodology with a one‐sided band pass filter and choosing nine leading series. Our main findings are that i) the applied...

This paper assesses the forecasting performance of various variable reduction and variable selection methods. A small and a large set of wisely chosen variables are used in forecasting the industrial production growth for four Euro Area economies. The results indicate that the Automatic Leading...

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models have recently become standard tools for policy-oriented analyses. Nevertheless, their forecasting properties are still barely explored. We fill this gap by comparing the quality of real-time forecasts from a richly-specified DSGE model to those from...

This paper analyses the real-time forecasting performance of the New Keynesian DSGE model of Galí, Smets, and Wouters (2012) estimated on euro area data. It investigates to what extent forecasts of inflation, GDP growth and unemployment by professional forecasters improve the forecasting...

Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing...

This paper analyses leading indicator properties of a broad set of credit spreads, compiled on the basis of information from both corporate bonds and bank loans for forecasting of real activity, unemployment, inflation and lending volumes in the euro area and in five major European economies. It...

The survey based monthly US ISM production index and Eurozone manufacturing PMI output index provide early information on industrial output growth before the release of the official industrial production index. I use the Carlson and Parkin probability method to construct monthly growth estimates...

This study develops a new monthly euro Area‐wide Leading Indicator (ALI) for the euro area business cycle. It derives the composite ALI by applying a deviation cycle methodology with a one‐sided band pass filter and choosing nine leading series. Our main findings are that i) the applied...

Reliable and timely information about current economic conditions is crucial for policy makers and expectations formation. This paper demonstrates the efficacy of the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and the Purchasing Manager Indices (PMI) in anticipating US real economic activity. We...