There are over 3 billion searches globally on Google every day. This report examines whether Google search queries can be used to predict the present and the near future unemployment rate in Finland. Predicting the present and the near future is of interest, as the official records of the state...

This paper presents a method to conduct early estimates of GDP growth in Germany. We employ MIDAS regressions to circumvent the mixed frequency problem and use pooling techniques to summarize efficiently the information content of the various indicators. More specifically, we investigate whether...

In this study some alternative forecasts for the unemployment rate of USA made by four institutions (International Monetary Fund (IMF), Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Blue Chips (BC)) are evaluated regarding the accuracy and...

In this paper article, two strategies based on the econometric approach are proposed in order to improve the forecast accuracy of GDP index in Romania. First, the index is predicted starting from an econometric model that reflects the relationship between the GDP index and the GDP deflator....

Econometric modeling of the exchange rate saw successive progresses, the forecasts based on the ‘70s models having a rather good accuracy, as recent researches showed. In order to explain the monthly evolution of RON/USA exchange rate during 2007-June 2011, I used three econometric models: a...

The aggregation of the variables that compose an indicator, as GDP, which should be forecasted, is not mentioned explicitly in literature as a source of forecasts uncertainty. In this study based on data on U.S. GDP and its components in 1995-2010, we found that GDP one-step-ahead forecasts made...

We use linear regression models and Bayesian Model Averaging procedure to investigate whether Google search query data can improve the nowcast performance of the monthly nonagricultural unemployment rate for Turkey for the period from January 2005 to January 2012. We show that Google search...

This paper documents GDPNow, a "nowcasting" model for gross domestic product (GDP) growth that synthesizes the "bridge equation" approach relating GDP subcomponents to monthly source data with the factor model approach used by Giannone, Reichlin, and Small (2008). The GDPNow model forecasts GDP...

For the timely detection of business-cycle turning points we suggest to use mediumsized linear systems (subset VARs with automated zero restrictions) to forecast the relevant underlying variables, and to derive the probability of the turning point from the forecast density as the probability...