Measuring economic activity in real-time is a crucial issue in applied research and in the decision-making process of policy makers; however, it also poses intricate challenges to statistical filtering methods that are built to operate optimally under the auspices of an infinite number of...

Most macroeconomic indicators failed to capture the sharp economic fluctuations during the Corona crisis in a timely manner. Instead, alternative high-frequency data have been used, aiming to monitor the economic situation. However, these data are often only loosely related to the business cycle...

Google Trends have become a popular data source for social science research. We show that for small countries or sub-national regions like U.S. states, underlying sampling noise in Google Trends can be substantial. The data may therefore be unreliable for time series analysis and is furthermore...

This paper presents a weekly GDP indicator for Switzerland, which addresses the limitations of existing economic activity indicators using alternative high-frequency data created in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The indicator is obtained from a Bayesian mixed-frequency dynamic factor model...