We offer a novel methodology for assessing the quality of inflation reports. In contrast to the existing literature, which mostly evaluates the formal quality of these reports, we evaluate their economic content by comparing inflation factors reported by the central banks with ex-post...

The paper considers the dynamic adjustments of an average opinion index that can be derived from a microfounded framework where the individual agents switch between two kinds of sentiment with certain transition probabilities. The index can thus represent a general business climate, i.e.,...

According to the growing “Google econometrics” literature, Google queries may help predict economic activity. The aim of our paper is to test whether these data can enhance predictions of youth unemployment in France.

According to the rising “Google econometrics” literature, Google queries may help predict economic activity. The aim of our paper is to test if these data can enhance predictions for youth unemployment in France. As we have on the one hand weekly series on web search queries and on the other...

Real-time macroeconomic data are typically incomplete for today and the immediate past (‘ragged edge’) and subject to revision. To enable more timely forecasts the recent missing data have to be imputed. The paper presents a state-space model that can deal with publication lags and data...

In this paper, we estimate deseasonalized monthly series for Swiss gross domestic product at constant prices of 1990 for the period 1980-1998. They are consistent with the quarterly figures estimated by the Federal Office for Economic Development and Labour and are obtained by including...