In the construction of a leading indicator model of economic activity, economists must select among a pool of variables which lead output growth. Usually the pool of variables is large and a selection of a subset must be carried out. This paper proposes an automatic leading indicator model...

Traditionally forecasts of macroeconomic aggregates are extracted from prospective qualitative survey data by relating official data on the aggregate to both the proportion of survey respondents who are 'optimists' and the proportion who are 'pessimists'. But there is no reason to focus on these...