Payment systems track economic transactions and therefore could be considered important indicators of economic activity. This paper describes the available monthly data on the retail settlement system for Italy and selects some of them for short-term forecasting. Using a mixed frequency factor...

This work documents the construction of the new quarterly indicator of regional economic activity (Indicatore Trimestrale dell'Economia Regionale – ITER), which uses a parsimonious set of regional variables and combines them by means of temporal disaggregation techniques to obtain a quarterly...

Can we use newspaper articles to forecast economic activity? Our answer is yes and, to this end, we propose a brand new economic dictionary in Italian with valence shifters, and we apply it to a corpus of about two million articles from four popular newspapers. We produce a set of high-frequency...