Since the influential paper of Stock and Watson (2002), the dynamic factor model (DFM) has been widely used for forecasting macroeconomic key variables such as GDP. However, the DFM has some weaknesses. For nowcasting, the dynamic factor model is modified by using the mixed data sampling...

The objective of this paper is to compare different forecasting methods for the short run forecasting of Business Survey Indicators. We compare the forecasting accuracy of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) vs. three different time series models: autoregressions (AR), autoregressive integrated...

Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing...

In this paper, we introduce a new US uncertainty index which is more sensitive to consumer spending and therefore reflects households’ decisions. We find evidence that macroeconomic uncertainty shocks impose negative, statistically significant, and long-lasting effects on consumption, income...