This paper performs a large-scale forecast evaluation exercise to assess the performance of different models for the short-term forecasting of GDP, resorting to large datasets from ten European countries. Several versions of factor models are considered and cross-country evidence is provided....

We estimate and forecast growth in euro area monthly GDP and its components from the dynamic factor model of Doz et al. (2006), which handles unbalanced data sets in an efficient way. We extend the model to integrate interpolation and forecasting with cross-equation accounting identities. A...

This paper evaluates models that exploit timely monthly releases to compute early estimates of current quarter GDP (now-casting) in the euro area. We compare traditional methods used at institutions with a new method proposed by Giannone, Reichlin and Small, 2005. The method consists in bridging...

We derive forecast weights and uncertainty measures for assessing the roles of individual series in a dynamic factor model (DFM) for forecasting the euro area GDP from monthly indicators. The use of the Kalman smoother allows us to deal with publication lags when calculating the above measures....

We derive forecast weights and uncertainty measures for assessing the roles of individual series in a dynamic factor model (DFM) for forecasting the euro area GDP from monthly indicators. The use of the Kalman smoother allows us to deal with publication lags when calculating the above measures....