The Covid-19 crisis has shown how high-frequency data can help tracking economic turning points in real-time. Our paper investigates whether high-frequency data can also improve the nowcasting performances for world GDP growth on quarterly or annual basis. To this end, we select a large dataset...

This paper evaluates whether publicly available daily news lead texts help nowcasting Swiss GDP growth. I collect titles and lead texts from three Swiss newspapers and calculate text-based indicators for various economic concepts. A composite indicator calculated from these indicators is highly...

In this paper we evaluate the relative merits of three approaches to information extraction from a large data set for forecasting, namely, the use of an automated model selection procedure, the adoption of a factor model, and single-indicator-based forecast pooling. The comparison is conducted...

In this paper we evaluate the role of a set of variables as leading indicators for Euro-area inflation and GDP growth. Our evaluation is based on using the variables in the ECB Euro-area model database, plus a set of similar variables for the US. We compare the forecasting performance of each...

Many small middle-income countries (SMICs) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have experienced a moderation in growth in recent years. Although factor accumulation, most notably capital deepening, was crucial to the success of many SMICs historically, this growth model appears to have run its course....

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 undetermined GVAR model. To solve this problem, we propose augmenting the GVAR with additional proxy equations for the...

Low positive GDP growth has been interpreted as evidence that the economy may be "stalling", implying that low growth is a strong predictor of future recessions. We examine the empirical evidence for stalling based on kernel density estimates, probit estimates and Markov switching models....

The slope of the Treasury yield curve has often been cited as a leading economic indicator, with inversion of the curve being thought of as a harbinger of a recession. In this paper, I consider a number of probit models using the yield curve to forecast recessions. Models that use both the level...

We study the conditional distribution of GDP growth as a function of economic and financial conditions. Deteriorating financial conditions are associated with an increase in the conditional volatility and a decline in the conditional mean of GDP growth, leading the lower quantiles of GDP growth...

Since the Great Recession in 2007-09, U.S. real GDP has failed to return to its previously projected path, a phenomenon widely associated with secular stagnation. We investigate whether this stagnation was due to hysteresis effects from the Great Recession, a persistent negative output gap...