By means of Self-Organizing Maps we cluster fourteen European countries according to the most suitable way to model their agents’ expectations. Using the financial crisis of 2008 as a benchmark, we distinguish between those countries that show a progressive anticipation of the crisis and those...

Business surveys are an important element in the analysis of the short-term economic situation because of the timeliness and nature of the information they convey. Especially, surveys are often involved in econometric models in order to provide an early assessment of the current state of the...

NZIER’s Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion (QSBO) is one of New Zealand’s leading economic indicators. March 2011 marked the 50th anniversary of the QSBO. The QSBO provides data driven insights into how firms are responding to current economic events. Due to its reliability and...

NZIER’s Quarterly Survey of Business Opinion (QSBO) contains a 50 year history of business opinion. While its predictive capabilities are well known, there are many more applications that can be pursued using QSBO data. This paper investigates one application, using the QSBO to forecast GDP...

Performance indices are used worldwide as indicators of activity in key sectors to assist analysts and decision-makers. An advantage of these indices is that, by pooling information from the series that make up the indices, idiosyncratic variation is smoothed out, and a stable and potentially...

For more than four decades, the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) has conducted a two-question, quarterly survey of architect forecasts of public and private sector construction expenditure. This qualitative survey is published one week after the end of each quarter and nine...

Purpose – Missing data are a recurring problem that can cause bias or lead to inefficient analyses. The objective of this paper is a direct comparison between the two statistical software features R and SPSS, in order to take full advantage of the existing automated methods for data editing...