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 on economic now-casting with special focus on those models that formalize key features of how market...

This paper estimates the contribution of financial shocks to fluctuations in the real economy by augmenting the standard macroeconomic vector autoregression (VAR) with five financial variables (real stock prices, real house prices, term spread, loans-to-GDP ratio and loans-to-deposits ratio)....

We examine the dynamic effects of credit shocks using a large data set of U.S. economic and financial indicators in a structural factor model. The identified credit shocks, interpreted as unexpected deteriorations of credit market conditions, immediately increase credit spreads, decrease rates...

This paper describes a method for calculating daily real-time estimates of the current state of the US economy. The estimates are computed from data on scheduled US macroeconomic announcements using an econometric model that allows for variable reporting lags, temporal aggregation, and other...

There has been a lot of interest recently in developing small-scale rule-based empirical macro models for the analysis of monetary policy. These models, based on the conventional view that inflation stabilization should be a concern of monetary policy only, have typically neglected the role of...

This Paper is the result of the Bank of Italy-CEPR project to construct a monthly coincident indicator of the business cycle of the euro area. The index is estimated on the basis of a harmonized data set of monthly statistics of the euro area (951 series) which we constructed from a variety of...

This paper studies the synchronization of output fluctuations in European regions and US counties. We extend the two component dynamic factor model à la Sargent and Sims (1977) by introducing an intermediate-level shock, which is common to all regions (counties) in each country (state), but it...

Recent research has shown that recursive real-time VAR forecasts of the real price of oil tend to be more accurate than forecasts based on oil futures prices of the type commonly employed by central banks worldwide. Such monthly forecasts, however, differ in several important dimensions from the...

The U.S. Energy Information Administration regularly publishes short-term forecasts of the price of crude oil. Traditionally, such out-of-sample forecasts have been largely judgmental, making them difficult to replicate and justify, and not particularly successful when compared with naïve...

We propose to use the attractiveness of pooling relatively short time series that display similar dynamics, but without restricting to pooling all into one group. We suggest estimating the appropriate grouping of time series simultaneously along with the group-specific model parameters. We cast...