In this paper, we assess the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts at the regional level using a large data set at quarterly frequency. We forecast gross domestic product (GDP) for two German states (Free State of Saxony and Baden-Württemberg) and Eastern Germany. We overcome the problem of a...

Recent years have seen the dramatic growth of new modes of communication. Above and beyond using land line and mobile phone for voice real-time communication, people spend increasing amounts of time receiving and sending messages through social networks (e.g. Myspace or Facebook) and also...

This paper investigates the accuracy of point and density forecasts of four dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models for output growth, inflation and the interest rate. The model parameters are estimated and forecasts are derived successively from historical U.S. data vintages...

Foreign economic activity is a major determinant of export development. This paper presents an indicator for now- and forecasting exports, which is based on survey data that captures foreign economic performance. We construct an indicator by weighting foreign PMIs of Switzerland's main trading...

In light of the recent large swings in stock and housing prices accompanied by ample global liquidity, the role of monetary policy in the build-up of asset price bubbles has been questioned. This paper will contribute to the debate whether central banks can and should stronger "lean against the...

We analyze the relationship between unemployment rate changes and government bond yields during and after the most recent financial crisis across nine industrialized countries. The study is conducted on a weekly basis and we therefore nowcast unemployment data, which are only available once a...

In past years, the most common approaches for deriving early-warning models belong to the family of binary-choice methods, which have been coupled with a separate loss function to optimize model signals based on policymakers preferences. The evidence in this paper shows that early-warning models...

To assess the performance of multivariate density forecasts for the world economy based on a Bayesian global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model, we decompose the predictive joint density into its marginals and a copula term that captures the dependence structure among variables and countries....

In this paper I use the predictive distribution of the back-, now- and forecasts obtained with a mixed-frequency Bayesian VAR (MF-BVAR) to provide a real-time assessment of the probability of a recession in the euro area for the period from 2003 until 2013. Using a dataset that consists of 135...

This paper shows entropic tilting to be a flexible and powerful tool for combining medium-term forecasts from BVARs with short-term forecasts from other sources (nowcasts from either surveys or other models). Tilting systematically improves the accuracy of both point and density forecasts, and...