Most economic time series indicate non-normality in the form of either occasional big shocks or marked changes in the level of the series. In this paper, a univariate state-space model with infinite variance symmetric stable shocks is used to model the U.S. inflation rate via the...

Financial indicators such as yield curves and stock prices have been extensively used as leading indicators of economic activity due to their forward looking content. Indeed, the Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States, a widely used forecasting tool for business cycle turning points,...

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...

The Google Insights data are a collection of recorded Internet searches for a huge number of the keywords, which are available since January 2004. These searches represent a kind of revealed perceptions of Internet users, which are a (possibly not entirely representative) sample of the general...

We reassess the predictability of U.S. recessions at horizons from three months to two years ahead for a large number of previously proposed leading-indicator variables. We employ an efficient probit estimator for partially missing data and assess relative model performance based on the receiver...

Every quarter, the Bank of Canada conducts quarterly consultations with businesses across Canada, referred to as the Business Outlook Survey (BOS). A principal-component analysis conducted by Pichette and Rennison (2011) led to the development of the BOS indicator, which summarizes survey...

In this paper we develop a small open economy model explaining the joint determination of output, inflation, interest rates, unemployment and the exchange rate in a multi-country framework. Our model – the Halle Economic Projection Model (HEPM) – is closely related to studies recently...