This paper deals with the topic of revision of data with the aim of investigating whether consecutive releases of macroeconomic series published by statistical agencies contain useful information for economic analysis and forecasting. The rationality of the re-visions process is tested...

This paper deals with the topic of revision of data with the aim of investigating whether consecutive releases of macroeconomic series published by statistical agencies contain useful information for economic analysis and forecasting. The rationality of the re-visions process is tested...

The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long-time in meteorology and recently also in economics. In this paper we survey recent developments in economic now-casting with special focus on those models that formalize key features of how market...

The paper focuses on the estimation of the euro area output gap. We construct model-averaged measures of the output gap in order to cope with both model uncertainty and parameter instability that are inherent to trend-cycle decomposition models of GDP. We first estimate nine models of...

The paper deals with the estimation of monthly indicators of economic activity for the Euro area and its largest member countries that possess the following attributes: relevance, representativeness and timeliness. Relevance is obtained by referring our monthly indicators to gross domestic...

This paper applies the factor model proposed by Giannone, Reichlin, and Small (2005) on a large data set to nowcast (i.e. current-quarter forecast) the annual growth rate of China's quarterly GDP. The data set contains 189 indicator series of several categories, such as prices, industrial...

EuroMInd-D is a density estimate of monthly gross domestic product (GDP) constructed according to a bottom-up approach, pooling the density estimates of eleven GDP components, by output and expenditure type. The components density estimates are obtained from a medium-size dynamic factor model of...

We develop a vector autoregressive model with time variation in the mean and the variance. The unobserved time-varying mean is assumed to follow a random walk and we also link it to long-term Consensus forecasts, similar in spirit to so called democratic priors. The changes in variance are...

Assessing potential output and the output gap is essential for policy-making and fiscal surveillance. The European Commission proposes a production function methodology that involves the estimation of two classes of Gaussian state space models. This paper presents the R package RGAP which...