Extending earlier research on forecasting recessions with financial variables, I examine the importance of additional financial variables and temporal dependence for recession prediction. I show that both additional financial variables, in particular, the Treasury bill spread, default yield...

We forecast recessions in Canada using an autoregressive (AR) probit model. In this model, the presence of the lagged latent variable, which captures the autocorrelation in the recession binary variable, results in an intractable likelihood with a high dimensional integral. Therefore, we employ...

In India, the first official estimate of quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) is released approximately 7-8 weeks after the end of the reference quarter. To provide an early estimate of current quarter GDP growth, we construct Coincident Economic Indicators for India (CEIIs) using a...

We extend the Markov-switching dynamic factor model to account for some of the specifi cities of the day-to-day monitoring of economic developments from macroeconomic indicators, such as ragged edges and mixed frequencies. We examine the theoretical benefi ts of this extension and corroborate...

This paper proposes a new model-based method to obtain a coincident indicator for the business cycle. A dynamic factor model with trend components and a common cycle component is considered which can be estimated using standard maximum likelihood methods. The multivariate unobserved components...

The Great Recession and the subsequent period of subdued GDP growth in most advanced economies have highlighted the need for macroeconomic forecasters to account for sudden and deep recessions, periods of higher macroeconomic volatility, and fluctuations in trend GDP growth. In this paper, we...