In this paper we propose to exploit the heterogeneity of forecasts produced by different model specifications to measure forecast uncertainty. Our approach is simple and intuitive.It consists in selecting all the models that outperform some benchmark model, and then to construct an empirical...

This paper provides a full technical account of the Italian General Equilibrium Model (IGEM), a new dynamic general equilibrium model for the Italian economy developed at the Department of Treasury of the Italian Ministry of the Economy and Finance. IGEM integrates typical New Keynesian...

In this paper, we exploit the heterogeneity in the forecasts obtained by estimating different factor models to measure forecast uncertainty. Our approach is simple and intuitive. It consists first in selecting all the models that outperform some benchmark model, and then in constructing an...

We present a mixed frequency model for daily forecasts of euro area inflation. The model combines a monthly index of core inflation with daily data from financial markets; estimates are carried out with the MIDAS regression approach. The forecasting ability of the model in real time is compared...

Payment systems track economic transactions and therefore could be considered important indicators of economic activity. This paper describes the available monthly data on the retail settlement system for Italy and selects some of them for short-term forecasting. Using a mixed frequency factor...

This work documents the construction of the new quarterly indicator of regional economic activity (Indicatore Trimestrale dell'Economia Regionale – ITER), which uses a parsimonious set of regional variables and combines them by means of temporal disaggregation techniques to obtain a quarterly...

Can we use newspaper articles to forecast economic activity? Our answer is yes and, to this end, we propose a brand new economic dictionary in Italian with valence shifters, and we apply it to a corpus of about two million articles from four popular newspapers. We produce a set of high-frequency...