The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long-time in meteorology and recently also in economics In this paper we survey recent developments on economic now-casting with special focus on those models that formalize key features of how market...

Economists have imperfect knowledge of the present state of the economy and even of the recent past. Many key statistics are released with a long delay and they are subsequently revised. As a consequence, unlike weather forecasters, who know what is the weather today and only have to predict the...

This paper shows that vector auto regression (VAR) with Bayesian shrinkage is an appropriate tool for large dynamic models. We build on the results of De Mol and co-workers (2008) and show that, when the degree of shrinkage is set in relation to the cross-sectional dimension, the forecasting...

We define nowcasting as the prediction of the present, the very near future and the very recent past. Key in this process is to use timely monthly information in order to nowcast quarterly variables that are published with long delays. We argue that the nowcasting process goes beyond the simple...

This paper assesses the performance of Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) for models of different size. We consider standard specifications in the macroeconomic literature based on, respectively, three and eight variables and compare results with those obtained by larger models containing...

This paper shows that Vector Autoregression with Bayesian shrinkage is an appropriate tool for large dynamic models. We build on the results by De Mol, Giannone, and Reichlin (2008) and show that, when the degree of shrinkage is set in relation to the cross-sectional dimension, the forecasting...