Using a unique dataset of 22.5 million news articles from the Dow Jones Newswires Archive, we perform an in depth real-time out-of-sample forecasting comparison study with one of the most widely used data sets in the newer forecasting literature, namely the FRED-MD dataset. Focusing on U.S. GDP,...

We have studied the relationship between Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) and Precision-Recall Curve (PRC) both analytically and using a real-life empirical example of yield spread as a predictor of recessions. We show that false alarm rate in ROC and inverted precision in PRC are...

This paper looks into the ’fine print’ of boosting for economic forecasting. By using German industrial production for the period from 1996 to 2014 and a data set consisting of 175 monthly indicators, we evaluate which indicators get selected by the boosting algorithm over time and four...

This paper estimates the causal effect of rural-urban migration on urban production in China. We use longitudinal data on manufacturing firms between 2001 and 2006 and exploit exogenous variation in rural-urban migration due to agricultural price shocks. Following a migrant inflow, labor costs...

The ifo Institute is Germany's largest business survey provider, with the ifo Business Climate Germany as one of the most important leading indicators for gross domestic product. However, the ifo Business Survey is not solely limited to the Business Climate and also delivers a multitude of...

This analysis investigates the predictive power of the most important leading indicators for the German economy, which are provided by the ifo Institute and IHS Markit. We conduct an out-of-sample, real-time forecast experiment for growth of gross domestic product and growth of gross value added...

Comprehensive and international comparable leading indicators across countries and continents are rare. In this paper, we use a free and instantaneous available source of leading indicators, the ifo World Economic Survey (WES), to forecast growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 44 countries...

We have argued that from the standpoint of a policy maker who has access to a number of expert forecasts, the uncertainty of a combined forecast should be interpreted as that of a typical forecaster randomly drawn from the pool. With a standard factor decomposition of a panel of forecasts, we...

This paper documents the existence of Political Forecast Cycles. In a theoretical model of political selection, we show that governments release overly optimistic GDP growth forecasts ahead of elections to increase the reelection probability. The bias arises from lack of commitment if voters are...

Using a novel dataset that contains qualitative firm survey data on sales forecasts as well as balance-sheet data on realized sales, we document that only major forecast errors are predictable and display autocorrelation. This result is a particular violation of the Full Information Rational...