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...

Economic policy makers, international organisations and private-sector forecasters commonly use short-term forecasts of real GDP growth based on monthly indicators, such as industrial production, retail sales and confidence surveys. An assessment of the reliability of such tools and of the...

While the usefulness of factor models has been acknowledged over recent years, little attention has been devoted to the forecasting power of these models for the Japanese economy. In this paper, we aim at assessing the relative performance of factor models over different samples, including the...

Forecasting the world economy is a difficult task given the complex interrelationships within and across countries. This paper proposes a number of approaches to forecast short-term changes in selected world economic variables and aims, first, at ranking various forecasting methods in terms of...

We use a newly available dataset of euro area quarterly national accounts fiscal data and construct multivariate, state-space mixed-frequencies models for the government deficit, revenue and expenditure in order to assess its information content and its potential use for fiscal forecasting and...

This paper analyses leading indicator properties of a broad set of credit spreads, compiled on the basis of information from both corporate bonds and bank loans for forecasting of real activity, unemployment, inflation and lending volumes in the euro area and in five major European economies. It...

This paper assesses the forecasting performance of various variable reduction and variable selection methods. A small and a large set of wisely chosen variables are used in forecasting the industrial production growth for four Euro Area economies. The results indicate that the Automatic Leading...

This paper describes an algorithm to compute the distribution of conditional forecasts, i.e. projections of a set of variables of interest on future paths of some other variables, in dynamic systems. The algorithm is based on Kalman filtering methods and is computationally viable for large...

This study develops a new monthly euro Area‐wide Leading Indicator (ALI) for the euro area business cycle. It derives the composite ALI by applying a deviation cycle methodology with a one‐sided band pass filter and choosing nine leading series. Our main findings are that i) the applied...

The ECB objective is set in terms of year on year growth rate of the Euro area HICP. Nonetheless, a good deal of attention is given to national data by market analysts when they try to anticipate monetary policy moves. In this paper we use the Generalized Dynamic Factor model to develop a set of...