This paper presents ideas and methods underlying the construction of an indicator that tracks euro area GDP growth but, unlike GDP growth, (i) is updated monthly and almost in real time, and (ii) is free from short-run dynamics. Removal of short-run dynamics from a time series to isolate the...

Real-time macroeconomic data are typically incomplete for today and the immediate past (‘ragged edge’) and subject to revision. To enable more timely forecasts the recent missing data have to be imputed. The paper presents a state-space model that can deal with publication lags and data...

In an important paper, Diebold and Rudebusch (1991) find that, despite good performance for post revision historical versions, the U.S. Index of Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) fails to improve forecasts in real time out-of-sample tests. This paper revisits the issue of real-time performance...

This paper examines various measures of synchronisation of recessions, including clustering of the onset of recession across economies, proportion of economies in expansion and the diffusion index of international coincident indexes, and shows that the recent global recession is possibly the...

This paper employs concepts from information theory for choosing the dimension of a data set. We propose a relative information measure connected to Kullback–Leibler numbers. By ordering the series of the data set according to the measure, we are able to obtain a subset of a data set that is...