The aim of this paper is to assess inflation forecasting acurracy over the short-term horizon using Consumer Price Index (CPI) disaggregated data. That is, aggregating forecasts is compared with aggregate forecasting. In particular, three questions are addressed: i) one should bottom-up or not,...

How should we forecast GDP? Should we forecast directly the overall GDP or aggregate the forecasts for each of its components using some level of disaggregation? The search for the answer continues to motivate several horse races between these two approaches. Nevertheless, independently of the...

We explore the use of nowcasts from the Philadelphia Survey of Professional Forecasters as a starting point for macroeconomic forecasting. Specifically, survey nowcasts are treated as anadditional observation of the time series of interest. This simple approach delivers enhanced model...

The estimation of dynamic factor models for large cross-sections poses a challenge in a real time environment. As macroeconomic data become available with different delays, unbalanced panel data sets with missing values at the end of the sample period (the so-called "jagged edge") have to be...

We compare theoretical and empirical forecasts computed by rational agents living in a model economy to those produced by professional forecasters. We focus on the variance of the prediction errors as a function of the forecast horizon and analyze the speed with which it converges to a constant...

We explore the use of univariate low-frequency filters in macroeconomic forecasting. This amounts to targeting only specific fluctuations of the time series of interest. We show through simulations that such approach is warranted and, using US data, we confirm empirically that consistent gains...

This paper investigates the dynamics of aggregate wages and prices in the United States (US) and the Euro Area (EA) with a special focus on persistence of real wages, wage and price inflation. The analysis is conducted within a structural vector error-correction model, where the structural...

This paper investigates the persistence of aggregate wages and prices in Portugal assuming a model of a unionized economy with imperfect competition. An impulse response analysis is conducted where the structural shocks are identified by taking into account the long-run properties of the model,...

In this paper we re-evaluate the empirical evidence on money-inflation Granger causality for the euro area and, in contrast to Trecroci and Vega (2000), conclude that money does in fact Granger cause inflation. We also show that it takes about a year and a half for changes in money growth to...

Over recent years several methods to deal with high-frequency data (economic, financial and other) have been proposed in the literature. An interesting example is for instance interval valued time series described by the temporal evolution of high and low prices of an asset. In this paper a new...