Analyzing the performance of the economy in real time is a challenge for those who must forecast macroeconomic variables such as inflation or employment. A key aspect of this challenge is evaluating the incoming flow of information contained in economic announcements. In this article, the...

Evidence from a large and growing empirical literature strongly suggests that there have been changes in inflation and output dynamics in the United Kingdom. This is largely based on a class of econometric models that allow for time-variation in coefficients and volatilities of shocks. While...

The post-GFC era sees slower global growth and a substantial Chinese slowdown, unusually combined with lower investment financing costs, and with the eventual prospect of a US-led re-tightening of global financial markets. For Indonesia in the medium term, these developments imply a slowing of...

DSGE models are a prominent tool for forecasting at central banks and the competitive forecasting performance of these models relative to alternatives-including official forecasts has been documented. When evaluating DSGE models on an absolute basis, however, we find that the benchmark estimated...

Using quarterly data for the Federal Republic of Germany, we generate four-quarter-ahead forecasts for real GDP growth. Throughout the seventies and eighties, real M1 is still the best predictor. It clearly outperforms interest rate-based forecasts, and within this group short-run interest rates...

The carry-over effect is the advance contribution of the old year to growth in the new year. Among practitioners the informative content of the carry-over effect for short-term forecasting is undisputed and is used routinely in economic forecasting. In this paper, the carry-over effect is...

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...

This paper extends the OECD Economics Department’s suite of short-term indicator models for quarterly GDP growth, which currently cover only the G7 countries, to the BRIICS countries. Reflecting the relative scarcity of high-quality macroeconomic time series, the paper adopts a small-scale...

After two generations of economic growth, the next phase of structural transformation for Asia will have several salient features. Our results suggest that no single policy orientation, pathway, or even destination will apply to all economies. The main driver for each economy's structural change...

This paper derives new theoretical results for forecasting with Global VAR (GVAR) models. It is shown that the presence of a strong unobserved common factor can lead to an undeter-mined GVAR model. To solve this problem, we propose augmenting the GVAR with additional proxy equations for the...