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...

Equilibrium business cycle models have typically less shocks than variables. As pointed out by Altug, 1989 and Sargent, 1989, if variables are measured with error, this characteristic implies that the model solution for measured variables has a factor structure. This paper compares estimation...

In a pioneering attempt we present the R(ecession)-word index for Switzerland. We evaluate its predictive ability of GDP growth using real-time vintages of GDP data, closely simulating flow of information in the past. We find that inclusion of the R-word index led to statistically significant...

On the basis of keyword searches in newspaper articles several versions of the Recession-word Index (RWI) are constructed for Germany and Switzerland. We use these indices in order to track the business cycle dynamics in these two countries. Our main findings are the following. First, we show...

This study investigates usefulness of business tendency surveys in industrial sector for out-of-sample prediction of growth of industrial production in Russia. A special attention is paid to performance of survey-augmented models during the recent Great Recession 2008/2009. Using the real-time...

On the basis of keyword searches in newspaper articles, several versions of the Recession-Word Index (RWI) are constructed for Germany and Switzerland. We use these indices in order to track the business cycle dynamics in these two countries. Our main findings are the following. First, we show...