We assess the usefulness of a large set of electronic payments data comprising debit and credit card transactions, as well as cheques that clear through the banking system, as potential indicators of current GDP growth. These variables capture a broad range of spending activity and are available...

The Great Recession and the subsequent period of subdued GDP growth in most advanced economies have highlighted the need for macroeconomic forecasters to account for sudden and deep recessions, periods of higher macroeconomic volatility, and fluctuations in trend GDP growth. In this paper, we...

Macro-based asset allocation, i.e., the identification of turning points in macro-financial cycles and the allocation of assets accordingly, has attracted a lot of interest in recent years. This interest was sparked by volatile financial markets, more synchronized returns across asset classes...

This paper assesses the OECD’s projections for GDP growth and inflation during the global financial crisis and recovery, focussing on lessons that can be learned. The projections repeatedly over-estimated growth, failing to anticipate the extent of the slowdown and later the weak pace of the...

This paper compares the short-term forecasting performance of state-of-the-art large-scale dynamic factor models (DFMs) and the small-scale bridge models routinely used at the OECD. Pseudo-real time out-of-sample forecasts for France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom and the United States...

This paper evaluates different models for the short-term forecasting of real GDP growth in ten selected European countries and the euro area as a whole. Purely quarterly models are compared with models designed to exploit early releases of monthly indicators for the nowcast and forecast of...

The present paper develops Adaptive Trees, a new machine learning approach specifically designed for economic forecasting. Economic forecasting is made difficult by economic complexity, which implies non-linearities (multiple interactions and discontinuities) and unknown structural changes (the...

Housing markets are large and highly volatile: they can thus create large macroeconomic risks. The current paper provides a bird’s eye view of where the housing markets of major OECD economies currently stand. It then uses the results of recently developed models to provide indications of...

Housing markets, which are large and subject to sharp swings, shape to a great extent countries’ exposure to economic crises and their capacity to recover from them. This paper analyses the transmission of housing-related shocks to the real economy: it investigates the role that policy plays...