We use a novel data set covering all domestic debit card transactions in physical terminals by Norwegian households, to nowcast quarterly Norwegian household consumption. These card payments data are free of sampling errors and are available weekly without delays, providing a valuable early...

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 test for bias and efficiency of the ECB inflation forecasts using a confidential dataset of ECB macroeconomic quarterly projections. We investigate whether the properties of the forecasts depend on the level of inflation, by distinguishing whether the inflation observed by the ECB at the time...

Financial shocks represent a major driver of fluctuations in tail risk, defined as the 5th percentile of the forecast distributions of output and inflation. Since the variance and the asymmetry of the forecast distributions are largely driven by the left tail, financial shocks turn out to play a...