The paper evaluates the quality of the German national accounting data (GDP and its use-side components) as measured by the magnitude and dispersion of the forecast/ revision errors. It is demonstrated that government consumption series are the least reliable, whereas real GDP and real private...

This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rates in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model...

In this paper we suggest an approach to comparison of models' forecasting performance in unstable environments. Our approach is based on combination of the Cumulated Sum of Squared Forecast Error Differential (CSSFED) suggested earlier in Welch and Goyal (2008) and the Bayesian change point...

We assess the forecasting performance of the nowcasting model developed at the New York FED. We show that the observation regarding a striking difference in the model's predictive ability across business cycle phases made earlier in the literature also applies here. During expansions, the...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...

In a pioneering attempt we present the R(ecession)-word index for Switzerland. We evaluate its predictive ability of GDP growth using real-time vintages of GDP data, closely simulating flow of information in the past. We find that inclusion of the R-word index led to statistically significant...

This study evaluates forecasting performance of a large-scale factor model developed in Siliverstovs and Kholodilin (2012) in a genuine ex ante forecasting exercise. We perform our forecast of GDP growth in Switzerland in real time using real-time data vintages collected at weekly frequency....

We extend the analysis of Christoffersen and Diebold (1998) on long-run forecasting in cointegrated systems to multicointegrated systems. For the forecast evaluation we consider several loss functions, each of which has a particular interpretation in the context of stock-flow models where...

This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rates in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model...

In this paper we extend the targeted-regressor approach suggested in Bai and Ng (2008) for variables sampled at the same frequency to mixed-frequency data. Our MIDASSO approach is a combination of the unrestricted MIxed-frequency DAta-Sampling approach (U-MIDAS) (see Foroni et al., 2015; Castle et...