In this paper, a large amount of different financial and macroeconomic variables are used to predict the U.S. recession periods. We propose a new cost-sensitive extension to the gradient boosting model which can take into account the class imbalance problem of the binary response variable. The...

Monitoring economic conditions in real time, or nowcasting, is among the key tasks routinely performed by economists. Nowcasting entails some key challenges, which also characterise modern Big Data analytics, often referred to as the three "Vs": the large number of time series continuously...

The Case-Shiller is the reference repeat-sales index for the U.S. residential real estate market, yet it is released with a two-month delay. We find that incorporating recent information from 71 financial and macro predictors improves backcasts, now-casts, and short-term forecasts of the index...