In Denmark official quarterly national accounts are only available for the period since 1977. The paper constructs a set of summary non-seasonally adjusted quarterly national accounts for Denmark for 1948-2010 in current and constant prices as well as a set of other key quarterly macroeconomic...

In Denmark official quarterly national accounts are only available for the period since 1977. The paper constructs a set of summary non-seasonally adjusted quarterly national accounts for Denmark for 1948-2010 in current and constant prices as well as a set of other key quarterly macroeconomic...

Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across...

Maravall and del Río (2001), analized the time aggregation properties of the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, which decomposes a time series into trend and cycle, for the case of annual, quarterly, and monthly data, and showed that aggregation of the disaggregate component cannot be obtained as...

In this paper we examine the quality of the initial estimates of the components of both real and nominal U.S. GDP. We introduce a number of new statistics for measuring the magnitude of changes in the components from the initial estimates available one month after the end of the quarter to the...

The shadow economy is an extensive phenomenon worldwide. It poses several questions, the consequences on fluctuations in economic activity being among the major ones. Based on official data, this paper establishes a set of cyclical properties of macroeconomic aggregates and studies how these...

In this paper we examine the quality of the initial estimates of headline GDP and 10 major components of both real and nominal U.S. GDP. We ask a number of questions about various characteristics of the differences between the initial estimates available one month after the end of the quarter to...

Are uncertainty shocks an important source of post WWII business cycle fluctuations? The evidence we present in this paper suggests they are. Using both the traditional measure of uncertainty – the stock market volatility index – and a new one - based on the number of New York Times’...

In this study we construct a business cycle indicator for the Netherlands. The Christiano-Fitzgerald band-pass .lter is employed to isolate the cycle using the de.nition of business cycle frequencies as waves with lengths longer than 3 years and shorter than 11 years. The main advantage of...

The statistical discrepancy is often used to gauge the reliability of national accounts data. Particularly since the mid-1980’s the statistical discrepancy in Australia has grown significantly in size and variance. In this paper we demonstrate that the overwhelming contribution to the size of...