A range of monthly series are currently available giving indications of short-term movements in output in the UK. The main aim of this paper is to suggest a formal and coherent procedure for grossing these monthly data up to represent the whole of GDP. Although the resultant estimates of GDP...

Survey data are widely used to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. This paper proposes an indicator based on a theoretically consistent procedure for quantifying firm-level survey responses that are ordered and categorical. Firms' survey responses...

Survey data are widely used to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. This paper proposes an indicator based on a theoretically consistent procedure for quantifying firm-level survey responses that are ordered and categorical. Firms" survey responses...

Traditionally forecasts of macroeconomic aggregates are extracted from prospective qualitative survey data by relating official data on the aggregate to both the proportion of survey respondents who are 'optimists' and the proportion who are 'pessimists'. But there is no reason to focus on these...

Qualitative business survey data are used widely to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. Traditional indicators exploit only aggregate survey information, namely the proportions of respondents who report “up” and “down”. This paper examines...

We derive monthly and quarterly series of UK GDP for the inter-war period from a set of indicators that were constructed at the time. We proceed to illustrate how the new data can contribute to our understanding of the economic history of the UK in the 1930s and have also used the series to draw...

We derive monthly and quarterly series of UK GDP for the inter-war period from a set of monthly indicators that were constructed by The Economist at the time. The monthly information is complemented with data for quarterly industrial production, allowing us to employ mixed-frequency methods to...

In the construction of a leading indicator model of economic activity, economists must select among a pool of variables which lead output growth. Usually the pool of variables is large and a selection of a subset must be carried out. This paper proposes an automatic leading indicator model...

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. As the data are qualitative bivariate ordered probit models,...