IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/intfor/v37y2021i2p687-707.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

ALICE: Composite leading indicators for euro area inflation cycles

Author

Listed:
  • de Bondt, Gabe J.
  • Hahn, Elke
  • Zekaite, Zivile

Abstract

This paper develops Area-wide Leading Inflation CyclE (ALICE) indicators with the aim to provide early signals for turning points in the euro area headline and core inflation cycles. The headline (core) ALICE leads the reference cycle by three (four) months and the lead times extend to five (nine) months based on longer-leading series. Both ALICE indicators signalled turning points in the inflation cycles ex post and also performed well in a simulated real-time exercise. Moreover, in particular the headline ALICE also appeared to be useful for quantitative forecasting of the direction and level of inflation.

Suggested Citation

  • de Bondt, Gabe J. & Hahn, Elke & Zekaite, Zivile, 2021. "ALICE: Composite leading indicators for euro area inflation cycles," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 687-707.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:intfor:v:37:y:2021:i:2:p:687-707
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2020.09.001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169207020301370
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2020.09.001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Nidhaleddine Ben Cheikh & Christophe Rault, 2016. "Recent estimates of exchange rate pass-through to import prices in the euro area," Review of World Economics (Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv), Springer;Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Kiel Institute for the World Economy), vol. 152(1), pages 69-105, February.
    2. Forni, Mario & Hallin, Marc & Lippi, Marco & Reichlin, Lucrezia, 2003. "Do financial variables help forecasting inflation and real activity in the euro area?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(6), pages 1243-1255, September.
    3. Castro, César & Jerez, Miguel & Barge-Gil, Andrés, 2016. "The deflationary effect of oil prices in the euro area," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 389-397.
    4. Lenza Michele & Warmedinger Thomas, 2011. "A Factor Model for Euro-area Short-term Inflation Analysis," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 231(1), pages 50-62, February.
    5. Jef Boeckx & Maarten Dossche & Alessandro Galesi & Boris Hofmann & Gert Peersman, 2019. "Do SVARs with sign restrictions not identify unconventional monetary policy shocks?," Working Papers 1926, Banco de España.
    6. Artis, M J, et al, 1995. "Predicting Turning Points in the UK Inflation Cycle," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 105(432), pages 1145-1164, September.
    7. Modugno, Michele, 2013. "Now-casting inflation using high frequency data," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 664-675.
    8. Adam Elbourne & Kan Ji, 2019. "Do zero and sign restricted SVARs identify unconventional monetary policy shocks in the euro area?," CPB Discussion Paper 391, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    9. Adam Elbourne & Kan Ji, 2019. "Do zero and sign restricted SVARs identify unconventional monetary policy shocks in the euro area?," CPB Discussion Paper 391.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    10. Howard L. Roth, 1986. "Leading indicators of inflation," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, vol. 71(Nov), pages 3-20.
    11. Banerjee, Anindya & Marcellino, Massimiliano, 2006. "Are there any reliable leading indicators for US inflation and GDP growth?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 137-151.
    12. J. M. Binner & R. K. Bissoondeeal & A. W. Mullineux, 2005. "A composite leading indicator of the inflation cycle for the Euro area," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 37(11), pages 1257-1266.
    13. Anindya Banerjee & Massimiliano Marcellino & Igor Masten, 2005. "Leading Indicators for Euro‐area Inflation and GDP Growth," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 67(s1), pages 785-813, December.
    14. Lawrence J. Christiano & Terry J. Fitzgerald, 2003. "The Band Pass Filter," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 44(2), pages 435-465, May.
    15. Artis, Michael J, et al, 1995. "Turning Point Prediction for the UK Using CSO Leading Indicators," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 47(3), pages 397-417, July.
    16. Anindya Banerjee & Bill Russell, 2006. "A markup model for forecasting inflation for the euro area," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(7), pages 495-511.
    17. Gabe J. Bondt & Elke Hahn, 2014. "Introducing the Euro Area‐wide Leading Indicator (ALI): Real‐Time Signals of Turning Points in the Growth Cycle from 2007 to 2011," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(1), pages 47-68, January.
    18. Dreger, Christian & Wolters, Jürgen, 2014. "Money demand and the role of monetary indicators in forecasting euro area inflation," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 303-312.
    19. Klaus-Jürgen Gern & Nils Jannsen & Stefan Kooths & Maik Wolters, 2015. "Quantitative Easing in the Euro Area: Transmission Channels and Risks," Intereconomics: Review of European Economic Policy, Springer;ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics;Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), vol. 50(4), pages 206-212, July.
    20. Cristadoro, Riccardo & Forni, Mario & Reichlin, Lucrezia & Veronese, Giovanni, 2005. "A Core Inflation Indicator for the Euro Area," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 37(3), pages 539-560, June.
    21. Chen, Sophia & Ranciere, Romain, 2019. "Financial information and macroeconomic forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 1160-1174.
    22. Edward S. Knotek & Saeed Zaman, 2017. "Nowcasting U.S. Headline and Core Inflation," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 49(5), pages 931-968, August.
    23. Pesaran, M. Hashem & Timmermann, Allan, 2009. "Testing Dependence Among Serially Correlated Multicategory Variables," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 104(485), pages 325-337.
    24. Giusto, Andrea & Piger, Jeremy, 2017. "Identifying business cycle turning points in real time with vector quantization," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 174-184.
    25. Quinn, Terry & Mawdsley, Andrew, 1996. "Forecasting Irish Inflation: A Composite Leading Indicator," Research Technical Papers 4/RT/96, Central Bank of Ireland.
    26. Levanon, Gad & Manini, Jean-Claude & Ozyildirim, Ataman & Schaitkin, Brian & Tanchua, Jennelyn, 2015. "Using financial indicators to predict turning points in the business cycle: The case of the leading economic index for the United States," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 426-445.
    27. C. Alan Garner, 1995. "How useful are leading indicators of inflation?," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, vol. 80(Q II), pages 5-18.
    28. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Addendum: Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(5), pages 768-768, November.
    29. Gibson, Heather D. & Lazaretou, Sophia, 2001. "Leading inflation indicators for Greece," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 18(3), pages 325-348, August.
    30. J. M. Binner & A. Fielding & A. W. Mullineux, 1999. "Divisia money in a composite leading indicator of inflation," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(8), pages 1021-1031.
    31. Klein, Philip A., 1986. "Leading indicators of inflation in market economies," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 2(4), pages 403-412.
    32. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(2), pages 301-320, April.
    33. Andrew Atkeson & Lee E. Ohanian, 2001. "Are Phillips curves useful for forecasting inflation?," Quarterly Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, vol. 25(Win), pages 2-11.
    34. Strauss, Jack, 2013. "Does housing drive state-level job growth? Building permits and consumer expectations forecast a state’s economic activity," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 77-93.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tesi Aliaj & Milos Ciganovic & Massimiliano Tancioni, 2023. "Nowcasting inflation with Lasso‐regularized vector autoregressions and mixed frequency data," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(3), pages 464-480, April.
    2. Brückbauer, Frank & Schröder, Michael, 2021. "Data resource profile: The ZEW FMS dataset," ZEW Discussion Papers 21-100, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zivile Zekaite & Gabe de Bondt & Elke Hahn, 2017. "Alice: A New Inflation Monitoring Tool," EcoMod2017 10414, EcoMod.
    2. Sandra Eickmeier & Christina Ziegler, 2008. "How successful are dynamic factor models at forecasting output and inflation? A meta-analytic approach," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(3), pages 237-265.
    3. Matteo Ciccarelli & Benoît Mojon, 2010. "Global Inflation," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(3), pages 524-535, August.
    4. Christiansen, Charlotte & Eriksen, Jonas N. & Møller, Stig V., 2019. "Negative house price co-movements and US recessions," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 382-394.
    5. In Choi & Hanbat Jeong, 2019. "Model selection for factor analysis: Some new criteria and performance comparisons," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(6), pages 577-596, July.
    6. Karim Barhoumi & Olivier Darné & Laurent Ferrara, 2014. "Dynamic factor models: A review of the literature," OECD Journal: Journal of Business Cycle Measurement and Analysis, OECD Publishing, Centre for International Research on Economic Tendency Surveys, vol. 2013(2), pages 73-107.
    7. Araujo, Gustavo Silva & Gaglianone, Wagner Piazza, 2023. "Machine learning methods for inflation forecasting in Brazil: New contenders versus classical models," Latin American Journal of Central Banking (previously Monetaria), Elsevier, vol. 4(2).
    8. Richard Schnorrenberger & Aishameriane Schmidt & Guilherme Valle Moura, 2024. "Harnessing Machine Learning for Real-Time Inflation Nowcasting," Working Papers 806, DNB.
    9. Aparicio, Diego & Bertolotto, Manuel I., 2020. "Forecasting inflation with online prices," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 232-247.
    10. Macias, Paweł & Stelmasiak, Damian & Szafranek, Karol, 2023. "Nowcasting food inflation with a massive amount of online prices," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 809-826.
    11. Paolo Fornaro & Henri Luomaranta, 2020. "Nowcasting Finnish real economic activity: a machine learning approach," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 58(1), pages 55-71, January.
    12. Marcellino, Massimiliano & Schumacher, Christian, 2007. "Factor-MIDAS for now- and forecasting with ragged-edge data: a model comparison for German GDP," Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies 2007,34, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    13. Antipa, Pamfili & Barhoumi, Karim & Brunhes-Lesage, Véronique & Darné, Olivier, 2012. "Nowcasting German GDP: A comparison of bridge and factor models," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 34(6), pages 864-878.
    14. Panopoulou, Ekaterini, 2007. "Predictive financial models of the euro area: A new evaluation test," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 23(4), pages 695-705.
    15. Scharnagl, Michael & Schumacher, Christian, 2007. "Reconsidering the role of monetary indicators for euro area inflation from a Bayesian perspective using group inclusion probabilities," Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies 2007,09, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    16. Jef Boeckx & Maarten Dossche & Alessandro Galesi & Boris Hofmann & Gert Peersman, 2019. "Do SVARs with sign restrictions not identify unconventional monetary policy shocks?," Working Papers 1926, Banco de España.
    17. Filippo Altissimo & Riccardo Cristadoro & Mario Forni & Marco Lippi & Giovanni Veronese, 2010. "New Eurocoin: Tracking Economic Growth in Real Time," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(4), pages 1024-1034, November.
    18. Jörg Breitung & Sandra Eickmeier, 2006. "Dynamic Factor Models," Springer Books, in: Olaf Hübler & Jachim Frohn (ed.), Modern Econometric Analysis, chapter 3, pages 25-40, Springer.
    19. Gupta, Rangan & Kabundi, Alain, 2011. "A large factor model for forecasting macroeconomic variables in South Africa," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 1076-1088, October.
    20. Adam Elbourne, 2019. "SVARs, the central bank balance sheet and the effects of unconventional monetary policy in the euro area," CPB Discussion Paper 407.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:intfor:v:37:y:2021:i:2:p:687-707. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ijforecast .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.