We assess the usefulness of a large set of electronic payments data comprising debit and credit card transactions, as well as cheques that clear through the banking system, as potential indicators of current GDP growth. These variables capture a broad range of spending activity and are available...

The debate on the order of integration of interest rates has long focused on the I(1) versus I(0) distinction. In this paper we instead use the wavelet OLS estimator of Jensen (1999) to estimate the fractional integration parameters of several interest rates for the United States and Canada from...

We introduce a flexible nonparametric technique that can be used to select weights in a forecast-combining regression. We perform a Monte Carlo study that evaluates the performance of the proposed technique along with other linear and nonlinear forecast-combining procedures. The simulation...