This paper analyses the performance of GDP growth and inflation forecasts for 25 transition countries between 1994 and 2007, as provided by 13 international institutions, including multilateral, private and academic forecasters. The empirical results show that there is a positive correlation...

This paper backtests a nowcast of Japan's real GDP growth. Its distinguishing features are use of genuine real-time data, a new revision analysis to track the nowcast's evolution, and a comparison with a market consensus forecast at 13 monthly forecasting horizons. The nowcast's forecasting...

We test and report on time series modelling and forecasting using several U.S. Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) as an input to forecasting real U.S. GDP and the unemployment rate. These time series have been addressed before, but our results are more statistically significant using more...

We construct risks around consensus forecasts of real GDP growth, unemployment, and inflation. We find that risks are time-varying, asymmetric, and partly predictable. Tight financial conditions forecast downside growth risk, upside unemployment risk, and increased uncertainty around the...

This paper discusses the forecasting performance of alternative factor models based on a large panel of quarterly time series for the German economy. One model extracts factors by static principal components analysis; the second model is based on dynamic principal components obtained using...

Macroeconomic data are subject to revision over time as later vintages are released, yet the usual way of generating real-time out-of-sample forecasts from models effectively makes no allowance for this form of data uncertainty. We analyse a simple method which has been used in the context of...

We utilize mixed frequency factor-MIDAS models for the purpose of carrying out pastcasting, nowcasting, and forecasting experiments using real-time data. We also introduce a new real-time Korean GDP dataset, which is the focus of our experiments. The methodology that we utilize involves first...

Beyond GDP, which is measured using expenditure data, the U.S. national income and product accounts (NIPAs) provide an income-based measure of the economy (gross domestic income, or GDI), a measure that averages GDP and GDI, and various aggregates that include combinations of GDP components....

Business and consumer surveys are the main source of agents' expectations. In this study we use survey expectations about a wide range of economic variables to forecast GDP growth. We propose an empirical approach to derive mathematical functional forms that link survey-based expectations to...

The paper introduces a Bayesian cross-entropy forecast (BCEF) procedure to assess the variance and skewness in density forecasting. The methodology decomposes the variance and skewness of the predictive distribution accounting for the shares of selected risk factors. The method assigns...