Data, data, data…. Economists know their importance well, especially when it comes to monitoring macroeconomic conditions—the basis for making informed economic and policy decisions. Handling large and complex data sets was a challenge that macroeconomists engaged in real-time analysis faced...

We define nowcasting as the prediction of the present, the very near future and the very recent past. Crucial in this process is to use timely monthly information in order to nowcast key economic variables, such as e.g. GDP, that are typically collected at low frequency and published with long...

The aim of this paper is to assess whether explicitly modeling structural change increases the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts. We produce real time out-of-sample forecasts for inflation, the unemployment rate and the interest rate using a Time-Varying Coefficients VAR with Stochastic...

We propose a class of prior distributions that discipline the long-run behavior of Vector Autoregressions (VARs). These priors can be naturally elicited using economic theory, which provides guidance on the joint dynamics of macroeconomic time series in the long run. Our priors for the long run...

The aim of this paper is to assess whether explicitly modeling structural change increases the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts. We produce real time out-of-sample forecasts for inflation, the unemployment rate and the interest rate using a Time-Varying Coefficients VAR with Stochastic...