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...

This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rates in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model...

This paper provides a general strategy for analyzing monetary policy in real time which accounts for data uncertainty without explicitly modelling the revision process. The strategy makes use of all the data available from a real-time data matrix and averages model estimates across all data...

This paper examines the consequences of using "real-time" data for business cycle analysis in Germany based on a novel data set covering quarterly real output data from 1968 to 2001. Real-time output gaps are calculated. They differ considerably from their counterparts based on the most recent...

Papers estimating the reaction function of the Bundesbank generally find that its monetary policy from the 1970s to 1998 can well be captured by a standard Taylor rule according to which the central bank responds to the output gap and to deviations of inflation from target, but not to monetary...

National accounts data are always revised. Not only recent data, but also figures dating many years back can be revised substantially. This means that there is a danger that an important part of the central bank's information set is flawed for a long period of time. In this paper we present a...

The dynamics of the Phillips Curve in New Keynesian, Expectations Augmented and Hybrid forms are extremely sensitive to the choice, timing and restrictions on variables. An important element of the debate revolves round what information decision-makers took into account at the time and round...

Recent work on policy rules under uncertainty have highlighted the impact of output gap measurement errors on economic outcomes and their importance in the formulation of appropriate policy rules. This paper investigates the reliability of current estimates of the output gap in Canada. We begin...

We start from the assertion that a useful monetary policy design should be founded on more realistic assumptions about what policymakers can know at the time when policy decisions have to be made. Since the Taylor rule - if used as an operational device - implies a forward looking behaviour, we...