Contrary to the number of unemployed or vacancies, the number of employees subject to social security contribu-tions (SSC) for Germany is published after a time lag of 2 months. Furthermore, there is a waiting period of 6 months until the values are not revised any more. This paper uses monthly...

This paper presents a novel dynamic factor model for non-stationary data. We begin by constructing a simple dynamic stochastic general equilibrium growth model and show that we can represent and estimate the model using a simple linear-Gaussian (Kalman) filter. Crucially, consistent estimation...

In this paper we investigate whether differences exist among forecasts using real-time or latest-available data to predict gross domestic product (GDP). We employ mixed-frequency models and real-time data to reassess the role of survey data relative to industrial production and orders in...

Data revisions to national accounts pose a serious challenge to policy decision making. Well-behaved revisions should be unbiased, small and unpredictable. This paper shows that revisions to German national accounts are biased, large and predictable. Moreover, using filtering techniques designed...

We develop a small-scale dynamic factor model for the Swiss economy based on an appropriately selected set of indicators. The resulting business cycle factor is in striking accordance with historical Swiss business cycle fluctuations. Our proposed model demonstrates a remarkable performance in...