The rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in world trade has brought both benefits and anxiety to other economies. For many policy questions, it is crucial to know the extent of foreign value added (FVA) in exports. We review a general formula in Koopman, Wang and Wei (2008) for...

The effectiveness of cyclically adjusted balances (CABs) as an indicator of the health of public finances depends on the accuracy with which cyclically adjusted figures can be calculated in real time. This paper measures the accuracy of such figures using a specially constructed real time data...

Existing methods for data interpolation or backdating are either univariate or based on a very limited number of series, due to data and computing constraints that were binding until the recent past. Nowadays large datasets are readily available, and models with hundreds of parameters are fastly...

This paper describes how we constructed a real-time database for the euro area covering more than 200 series regularly published in the European Central Bank Monthly Bulletin, as made available ahead of publication to the Governing Council members before their first meeting of the month. We...

National accounts statistics undergo a process of revisions over time because of the accumulation of information and, less frequently, of deeper changes, as new definitions, new methodologies etc. are implemented. In this paper we try to characterise the revision process of the data of Italian...

Pooling forecasts obtained from different procedures typically reduces the mean square forecast error and more generally improves the quality of the forecast. In this paper we evaluate whether pooling interpolated or backdated time series obtained from different procedures can also improve the...

This Paper is an exercise in dating the euro area business cycle on a monthly basis. We construct several monthly European real GDP series, and then apply the Bry-Boschan (1971) procedure. Using this method we identify four business cycles. Studying further indicators of business activity, we...

We document the empirical properties of revisions to major macroeconomic variables in the United States. Our findings suggest that they do not satisfy simple desirable statistical properties. In particular, we find that these revisions do not have a zero mean, which indicates that the initial...

Inaccurate measures of the aggregate price level may distort short-run policy decisions and may produce misleading comparisons of productivity growth across decades and among nations. Primarily intended for non-US readers, this paper serves the dual purpose of reviewing compactly the vast US...

We argue that a sensible measure of the aggregate value of human capital is the ratio of total labour income per capita to the wage of a person with zero years of schooling. The reason is that total labour income not only incorporates human capital, but also physical capital: given human...