Monitoring economic conditions in real time, or nowcasting, is among the key tasks routinely performed by economists. Nowcasting entails some key challenges, which also characterise modern Big Data analytics, often referred to as the three "Vs": the large number of time series continuously...

Rationality of early release data is typically tested using linear regressions. Thus, failure to reject the null does not rule out the possibility of nonlinear dependence. This paper proposes two tests that have power against generic nonlinear alternatives. A Monte Carlo study shows that the...

In recent years, numerous volatility-based derivative products have been engineered. This has led to interest in constructing conditional predictive densities and confidence intervals for integrated volatility. In this paper, we propose nonparametric kernel estimators of the aforementioned...

Data, data, data . . . Economists know it well, especially when it comes to monitoring macroeconomic conditions - the basis for making informed economic and policy decisions. Handling large and complex data sets was a challenge that macroeconomists engaged in real-time analysis faced long before...

We compare sparse and dense representations of predictive models in macroeconomics, microeconomics, and finance. To deal with a large number of possible predictors, we specify a prior that allows for both variable selection and shrinkage. The posterior distribution does not typically concentrate...