We characterise the relationships between preliminary and subsequent measurements for 16 commonly-used UK macroeconomic indicators drawn from two existing real-time data sets and a new nominal variable database. Most preliminary measurements are biased predictors of subsequent measurements, with...

Releases of the GDP are subject to revisions over time. This paper examines the predictability of German GDP revisions using forecast rationality tests. Previous studies of German GDP covering data until 1997 finds that revisions of real seasonally adjusted GDP are predictable. This paper uses a...

We analyze five vintages of eighteen quarterly macroeconomic variables for the Netherlands and we focus on the degree of deterministic seasonality in these series. We document that the data show most such deterministic seasonality for their first release vintage and for the last available...

Recent research examining U.S. macroeconomic data suggests that revisions may be much more important than traditionally assumed. This paper extends the analysis to Chinese data, where there has been substantial debate about data quality for some time. The key finding in this paper is that indeed...

Forecasts are only as good as the data behind them. But macroeconomic data are revised, often significantly, as time passes and new source data become available and conceptual changes are made. How is forecasting influenced by the fact that data are revised? To answer this question, we begin...

Official estimates of economic growth are regularly revised and therefore forecasts for GDP growth are done on the basis of ever-changing data. The economic literature has intensively studied the properties of those revisions and their implications for forecasting models. However, it is much...

We characterise the relationships between preliminary and subsequent measurements for 16 commonly-used UK macroeconomic indicators drawn from two existing real-time data sets and a new nominal variable database. Most preliminary measurements are biased predictors of subsequent measurements, with...

Initially published estimates of the personal saving rate from 1965 Q3 to 1999 Q2, which averaged 5.3 percent, have been revised up 2.8 percentage points to 8.1 percent, as we document. We show that much of the initial variations in personal saving rate across time was pure noise. Nominal...

This paper compares the results of applying several detrending methods to the Chilean monthly economic activity index (IMACEC) using real-time data sets. We show that data revisions are extremely important and that they can lead to systematically inconsistent estimates of the trend component....