Many central banks and government agencies use nowcasting techniques to obtain policy relevant information about the business cycle. Existing nowcasting methods, however, have two critical shortcomings for this purpose. First, in contrast to machine-learning models, they do not provide much if...

We find that financial analysts provide more thorough forecasts when firms’ institutional investors are distracted (i.e., when firms are neglected). We establish the causality of the effect by identifying exogenous shocks leading to institutional investor distraction following Kempf, Manconi,...

Many central banks and government agencies use nowcasting techniques to obtain policy relevant information about the business cycle. Existing nowcasting methods, however, have two critical shortcomings for this purpose. First, in contrast to machine-learning models, they do not provide much if...