Payment systems track economic transactions and therefore could be considered important indicators of economic activity. This paper describes the available monthly data on the retail settlement system for Italy and selects some of them for short-term forecasting. Using a mixed frequency factor...

Can we use newspaper articles to forecast economic activity? Our answer is yes and, to this end, we propose a brand new economic dictionary in Italian with valence shifters, and we apply it to a corpus of about two million articles from four popular newspapers. We produce a set of high-frequency...

The Covid-19 epidemic affected the ability of traditional forecasting models to produce reliable scenarios for the evolution of economic activity. We combine macroeconomic variables with epidemiological indicators to account for the Covid-19 shock and predict the short-term evolution of Italian...