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...

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...

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...

Business investment is a very important variable for short- and medium-term economic analysis, but it is volatile and difficult to predict. Qualitative business survey data are widely used to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. Traditional...

In this paper we explore the performance of bridge and factor models in forecasting quarterly aggregates in the very short-term subject to a pre-selection of monthly indicators. Starting from a large information set, we select a subset of targeted predictors using data reduction techniques as in...

We quantitatively assess the macroeconomic effects of country-specific supply-side reforms in the euro area by simulating EAGLE, a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model. We consider reforms in the labor and services markets of Germany (or, alternatively, Portugal) and the rest of the...

Recent empirical literature shows that key macro variables such as GDP and productivity display long memory dynamics. For DSGE models, we propose a �Generalized� Kalman Filter to deal effectively with this problem: our method connects to and innovates upon data-filtering techniques...