This paper constructs six leading indexes of New Zealand employment and compares their short term forecasting performance. Forecasting New Zealand employment is particularly difficult owing to the volatility of the data and the short sample size of available time series. These restrictions make leading indexes especially appealing. The paper has two aims. The first is to construct an effective forecasting tool. The second is to evaluate leading indexes constructed using different methods available in the literature. The results show that an index constructed using the traditional NBER method dominates in terms of forecasting performance. The results also suggest that increasing the dataset does not strengthen the index and that exogenously determining the weights of component series can add to forecasting performance.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Australian National University, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis in its series CAMA Working Papers with number
2007-17.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 1999.
"Forecasting Inflation,"
NBER Working Papers
7023, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Did you know? Citation analysis on IDEAS includes online papers that are freely accessible and whose text could be automatically analyzed, currently about 150000 papers.