This paper proposes a simple procedure to obtain monthly assessments of short-run perspectives for quarterly world GDP and trade. It combines emerging and advanced countries� high frequency information to explain quarterly national accounts variables through bridge models. The union of all...

In this paper we investigate the main features of the Italian financial cycle, extracted by means of a structural trend-cycle decomposition of the credit-to-GDP ratio, using annual observations from 1861 to 2011. In order to draw conclusions based on solid historical data, we provide a thorough...

This paper considers the problem of testing against stochastic trend and seasonality in the presence of structural breaks and unit roots at frequencies other than those directly under test, which we term unattended breaks and unattended unit roots respectively. We show that under unattended...

Tests of parameter instabilities are likely to have low power when change-points occur towards the end of the sample. This paper considers various modifications of existing tests and introduces new statistics designed to have high power in such circumstances. The properties of both Wald-type...

Assessing the global economic outlook is a fundamentally important task of international financial institutions, governments and central banks. In this paper we focus on the consequences of the rapid growth of emerging markets for monitoring and forecasting the global outlook. Our main results...

This paper proposes the use of Bayesian model averaging (BMA) as a tool to select the predictors' set for bridge models. BMA is a computationally feasible method that allows us to explore the model space even in the presence of a large set of candidate predictors. We test the performance of BMA...

We suggest the use of an index of Internet job-search intensity (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US monthly unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more...

Quantitative information on the current state of the economy is crucial to economic policy-making, but the quarterly national accounts data for GDP in the euro area are released with a significant delay. This paper presents alternative models for the real-time forecasting of euro area GDP and...

The aim of the present work is to obtain short-term predictions of the monthly volume of the industrial production of the euro area. Preliminary information on the behaviour of this variable is needed, since the index is released with a lag of about two months. A model based on the US industrial...

A great deal of new quantitative research has been produced over the last three decades which has radically changed the received interpretation of Italian economic development. Against this backdrop, the Bank of Italy, Istat and the University of Rome "Tor Vergata", together with academics from...