Using the Consensus Economics dataset with individual expertforecasts from G7 countries we investigate determinants of disagreement (crosssectionaldispersion of forecasts) about six key economic indicators. Disagreementabout real variables (GDP, consumption, investment and unemployment)has a...

Forecasting the world economy is a di¢ cult task given the complex interre-lationships within and across countries. This paper proposes a number ofapproaches to forecast short-term changes in selected world economic vari-ables and aims, …rst, at ranking various forecasting methods in terms...

This paper analyses the real-time forecasting performance of the New Keynesian DSGE model of Galí, Smets, and Wouters (2012) estimated on euro area data. It investigates to what extent forecasts of inflation, GDP growth and unemployment by professional forecasters improve the forecasting...

The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long-time in meteorology and recently also in economics. In this paper we survey recent developments in economic now-casting with special focus on those models that formalize key features of how market...

The information content of broad money M3 for future GDP inflation in the euro area is investigated from a number of perspectives. Firstly, tests that money does not Granger-cause prices are conducted within a cointegrated VAR system comprising real M3 holdings, real GDP, inflation and short-...

Following the discontinuation of the official statistics on industrial new orders by Eurostat in mid-2012, this paper introduces the ECB indicator on euro area industrial new orders, which aims to fill the new statistical gaps for euro area total new orders as well as for various breakdowns....

To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first systematic study of the predictive power of monetary aggregates for future inflation for the cross section of New EU Member States. This paper provides stylized facts on monetary versus non-monetary (economic and fiscal) determinants of...

Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing...

In this paper I evaluate the usefulness of a set of fiscal indicators as early-warning-signal tools for annual General Government Net Lending developments for some EMU countries (Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Ireland, Austria, Finland) and an EMU aggregate. The...

We propose an optimal filter to transform the Conference Board Composite Leading Index (CLI) into recession probabilities in the US economy. We also analyze the CLI's accuracy at anticipating US output growth. We compare the predictive performance of linear, VAR extensions of smooth transition...