This paper documents the existence of Political Forecast Cycles. In a theoretical model of political selection, we show that governments release overly optimistic GDP growth forecasts ahead of elections to increase the reelection probability. The bias arises from lack of commitment if voters are...

This paper documents the existence of electoral cycles in GDP growth forecasts released by governments. In a theoretical model of political selection, we show that governments release overly optimistic GDP growth forecasts ahead of elections to increase the reelection probability. The bias...

We provide a tractable characterization of the sharp identification region of the parameters ø in a broad class of incomplete econometric models. Models in this class have set valued predictions that yield a convex set of conditional or unconditional moments for the observable model variables....

Established nowcasting techniques generally use as inputs two types of economic data: directly quantifiable variables, mostly referred to as hard data, and survey-based measures of the economy, or soft data. In this paper we increase the dimensionality of the nowcasting input data set by...