Having a correct assessment of current business cycle conditions is one of the major challenges for monetary policy conduct. Given that GDP figures are available with a significant delay central banks are increasingly using Nowcasting as a useful tool for having an immediate perception of...

We forecast economic activity in Argentina on a quarterly real-time basis using dynamic factors models (DFM) (Blanco et al. 2018) and evaluate their forecasting performance during the COVID19 pandemic of 2020. We compare the results of forecasts based on a pre-pandemic estimation of the...

The Central Banks use diffusion indexes (DIs) to synthesize information from proprietary surveys that complement official statistics generating real time proxies of the economically relevant variables. According to the evidence, the DIs closely follow the economic cycle reflected in those...