The qualitative responses that firms give to business survey questions regarding changes in their own output provide a real-time signal of official output changes. The most commonly-used method to produce an aggregate quantitative indicator from business survey responses - the net balance, or...

In this paper we investigate whether and how far density forecasts sensibly can be combined to produce a "better" pooled density forecast. In so doing we bring together two important but hitherto largely unrelated areas of the forecasting literature in economics, density forecasting and forecast...

This paper assesses the accuracy of individuals’ expectations of their financial circumstances, as reported in the British Household Panel Survey, as predictors of outcomes and identifies what factors influence their reliability. Bivariate ordered probit models, appropriately identified, are...

*There is widespread concern about rising levels of debt prompted by the rising overall levels of debt and the increasing reports of people having difficulties in managing their debts. *Analysis of the data on wealth and borrowing in the British Household Panel Survey in 1995 and 2000 finds that...

We argue that the next generation of macro modellers at Inflation Targeting central banks should adapt a methodology from the weather forecasting literature known as `ensemble modelling'. In this approach, uncertainty about model specifications (e.g., initial conditions, parameters, and boundary...

We propose a methodology to gauge the uncertainty in output gap nowcasts across a large number of commonly-deployed vector autoregressions in US inflation and various measures of the output gap. Our approach constructs ensemble nowcast densities using a linear opinion pool. This yields...

Recent estimates suggest that the UK business cycle is closer to the Euro zone business cycle than it was in the early 1990s. This paper investigates whether this phenomenon has been accompanied by increased correlation between UK and Eurozone business cycles. Considering a range of alternative...

This paper has three aims. First, we summarise and thereby make readily available the historical time-series of quarterly density forecasts of year ahead RPIX (RPI excluding mortgage payments) inflation made by the National Institute for the period 1994Q1-2004Q4. Previous work has focused on...

The business cycle has an importance in the popular debate which can tend to run ahead of the problems in measuring it. This paper provides a survey of the main statistical techniques that are used to measure the cycle. An application to the UK illustrates that the choice of what measure, or...