In this chapter we provide a guide for the construction, use and evaluation of leading indicators, and an assessment of the most relevant recent developments in this field of economic forecasting. To begin with, we analyze the problem of indicator selection, choice of filtering methods, business...

This contribution investigates the business cycles of Switzerland compared to its five neighboring countries Germany, Austria, Italy, France and Liechtenstein. In contrast to the widespread notion of small countries "importing" the business cycle from bigger neighbors, it is shown that the real...

A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference series. (2) The relation between the reference series and the indicator should be statistically significant and stable over time....

This paper proposes a new model-based method to obtain a coincident indicator for the business cycle. A dynamic factor model with trend components and a common cycle component is considered which can be estimated using standard maximum likelihood methods. The multivariate unobserved components...

We construct a composite index to measure real activity of the Swiss economy on a weekly frequency. The index is based on a novel high-frequency data-set capturing economic activity across distinct dimensions over a long-time horizon. An adequate adjustment of raw data prior to deriving the...

We develop a dynamic factor model with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility, estimate it with several variables for a large number of countries and decompose the variance of each variable in terms of contributions from uncertainty common to all countries (global uncertainty),...

We build a dynamic factor model with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility and use it to decompose the variance of a large set of financial and macroeconomic variables for 22 OECD countries spanning from 1960 onwards into contributions from country-specific uncertainty,...

We conceptualize global liquidity as global monetary policy and credit components by means of a large-scale dynamic factor model. Going beyond previous work, we decompose aggregate credit components into credit supply and demand flows directed at businesses, households and governments. We show...

We conceptualize global liquidity as global monetary policy and credit components by means of a large-scale dynamic factor model in the spirit of Eickmeier,Gambacorta, and Hofmann (2014). Going beyond previous work, we decompose aggregate credit components into credit supply and demand flows...

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...