<b> </b> This paper evaluates models that exploit timely monthly releases to compute early estimates of current quarter GDP (now‐casting) in the euro area. We compare traditional methods used at institutions with a new method proposed by Giannone et al. The method consists in bridging quarterly GDP...

Based on a study conducted for the European Parliament, Bonn 2011 (144 pages)

We derive forecast weights and uncertainty measures for assessing the roles of individual series in a dynamic factor model (DFM) for forecasting the euro area GDP from monthly indicators. The use of the Kalman smoother allows us to deal with publication lags when calculating the above measures....

The study investigates long-run relationships between futures and spot prices of cocoa on the New York CSCE and London Fox, respectively, and between both markets. By means of the Johansen Maximum Likelihood approach and the inclusion of interest rates as conditioning variables, the three...

In the first quarter of 2009, the Austrian economy shrank at a seasonally and working day adjusted rate of 2.8 percent in real terms compared with the previous quarter (after –0.4 percent in the fourth quarter of the previous year). Hence, GDP was 3.6 percent below the year-earlier level (+0.0...

The Austrian economy shrank by 2.8 percent in real terms in the first quarter of 2009 compared with the previous quarter, after a 0.4 percent drop in the fourth quarter of the previous year. Global trade continued to plummet in the first quarter, which strongly affected Austrian exports. As a...

This paper evaluates models that exploit timely monthly releases to compute early estimates of current quarter GDP (now-casting) in the euro area. We compare traditional methods used at institutions with a new method proposed by Giannone, Reichlin, and Small (2005). The method consists in...

Monetary and fiscal authorities in many industrial countries use the concept of aggregate potential output as an analytical device to monitor underlying trends or structural developments in key macroeconomic policy variables. Above all, aggregate potential output serves economic policy and...

Most empirical approaches to measuring potential output (PO) are based on variants of the method of trend extraction. This is also true for estimating PO on the basis of production functions. Structural approaches rely on trend extraction methods, in connection with determining potential...