We suggest the use of an Internet job-search indicator (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt both our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more standard...

The paper provides an overview of the main statistics produced by the Bank of Italy: financial accounts, monetary statistics, balance of payments, household and business surveys. The volume discusses the problems related to the measurement of economic phenomena, how statistics can be used for...

Can we use newspaper articles to forecast economic activity? Our answer is yes and, to this end, we propose a brand new economic dictionary in Italian with valence shifters, and we apply it to a corpus of about two million articles from four popular newspapers. We produce a set of high-frequency...

The size and power properties of several tests of equal Mean Square Prediction Error (MSPE) and of Forecast Encompassing (FE) are evaluated, using Monte Carlo simulations, in the context of dynamic regressions. For nested models, the F-type test of forecast encompassing proposed by Clark and...

We suggest the use of an index of Internet job-search intensity (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US monthly unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more...