The focus of this paper is on nowcasting and forecasting quarterly private consumption. The selection of real-time, monthly indicators focuses on standard (“hard”/“soft” indicators) and less-standard variables. Among the latter group we analyze: i) proxy indicators of economic and policy...

We use a novel data set covering all domestic debit card transactions in physical terminals by Norwegian households, to nowcast quarterly Norwegian household consumption. These card payments data are free of sampling errors and are available weekly without delays, providing a valuable early...

The goal of SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) is to facilitate the emergence of a competitive, intra-European market by making cross-border payments as easy as domestic transactions. With crossborder inter-operability for electronic payments, card transactions will increasingly replace cash and...

This paper deals with the estimation of employment equations for Germany, which are to be used for forecasting and simulation purposes. The authors estimate both single and system error correction equations for German working hours using quarterly raw data covering the period 1980:1-2004:2....

This paper considers factor forecasting with national versus factor forecasting with international data. We forecast German GDP based on a large set of about 500 time series, consisting of German data as well as data from Euro-area and G7 countries. For factor estimation, we consider standard...