The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long time in meteorology and recently also in economics. In this chapter we survey recent developments in economic now-casting with special focus on those models that formalize key features of how market...

We analyse the panel of the Greenbook forecasts (sample 1970-1996) and a large panel of monthly variables for the US (sample 1970-2003) and show that the bulk of dynamics of both the variables and their forecasts is explained by two shocks. Moreover, a two factor model which exploits, in real...

In this study we find that the set of policies that favour liberalization in credit markets (regulatory quality) are negatively correlated with countries' resilience to the recent recession as measured by output growth in 2008 and 2009

This paper considers Bayesian regression with normal and double-exponential priors as forecasting methods based on large panels of time series. We show that, empirically, these forecasts are highly correlated with principal component forecasts and that they perform equally well for a wide range...

This paper formalizes the process of updating the nowcast and forecast on output and inflation as new releases of data become available. The marginal contribution of a particular release for the value of the signal and its precision is evaluated by computing "news" on the basis of an evolving...

This paper shows that the EMU has not affected historical characteristics of member countries’ business cycles and their cross-correlations. Member countries which had similar levels of GDP percapita in the seventies have also experienced similar business cycles since then and no significant...

Is maximum likelihood suitable for factor models in large cross-sections of time series? We answer this question from both an asymptotic and an empirical perspective. We show that estimates of the common factors based on maximum likelihood are consistent for the size of the cross-section (n) and...

This paper evaluates models that exploit timely monthly releases to compute early estimates of current quarter GDP (now-casting) in the euro area. We compare traditional methods used at institutions with a new method proposed by Giannone, Reichlin, and Small (2005). The method consists in...