Economic policies are generally formulated on the basis of data available in real time, which might subsequently be revised. Implicitly, the possibility of data revisions creates an element of uncertainty around the very same data driving policy decisions. Given that such uncertainty could be...

This study analyzes the performance of the IMF World Economic Outlook forecasts for world output and the aggregates of both the advanced economies and the emerging and developing economies. With a focus on the forecast for the current and the next year, we examine whether IMF forecasts can be...

In an effort to address the lacuna in leading indicator studies of African economies and Nigeria in particular, this paper examines the causal relationships among stock market prices, real GDP and the index of industrial production in Nigeria, using quarterly data from 1984Q1 to 2008Q4. Granger...

This paper aims to extract the common variation in a data set of 509 conjunctural series as an indication of the Belgian business cycle. The data set contains information on business and consumer surveys of Belgium and its neighbouring countries, macroeconomic variables and some worldwide...

Objective: The objective of the article is to prove the empirical and predictive value of the aggregate opinions of businesses and households for expanding cyclical macroeconomic data in Russia, especially during the coronavirus shocks. Research Design & Methods: We use qualitative information...

This paper proposes a methodology for constructing a Financial Conditions Indicator (FCI) based on factor analysis and the approaches of Brave and Butters (2011) and Aramonte et al. (2013). A selected set of variables is used and their information content aggregated into a single index that...

This study analyses the performance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook output forecasts for the world and for both the advanced economies and the emerging and developing economies. With a focus on the forecast for the current year and the next year, we examine the...

This paper evaluates whether publicly available daily news lead texts help nowcasting Swiss GDP growth. I collect titles and lead texts from three Swiss newspapers and calculate text-based indicators for various economic concepts. A composite indicator calculated from these indicators is highly...

In this paper, we propose an econometric model of the joint dynamic relationship between the yield curve and the economy to predict business cycles. We examine the predictive value of the yield curve to forecast future economic growth as well as the beginning and end of economic recessions at...

The crisis periods of the past decades have highlighted the difficulty of forecasting economic indicators due to increased non-linearity and rapidly changing dynamics. To address this challenge, we introduce the Transform-Sparsify-Forecast (TSF) framework. The TSF framework first applies...