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Advances in Nowcasting Economic Activity: Secular Trends, Large Shocks and New Data

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  • Petrella, Ivan
  • Antolin-Diaz, Juan
  • Drechsel, Thomas

Abstract

A key question for households, firms, and policy makers is: how is the economy doing now? We develop a Bayesian dynamic factor model and compute daily estimates of US GDP growth. Our framework gives prominence to features of modern business cycles absent in linear Gaussian models, including movements in long-run growth, time-varying uncertainty, and fat tails. We also incorporate newly available high-frequency data on consumer behavior. The model beats benchmark econometric models and survey expectations at predicting GDP growth over two decades, and advances our understanding of macroeconomic data during the recession of spring 2020.

Suggested Citation

  • Petrella, Ivan & Antolin-Diaz, Juan & Drechsel, Thomas, 2021. "Advances in Nowcasting Economic Activity: Secular Trends, Large Shocks and New Data," CEPR Discussion Papers 15926, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15926
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    Cited by:

    1. Longo, Luigi & Riccaboni, Massimo & Rungi, Armando, 2022. "A neural network ensemble approach for GDP forecasting," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 134(C).
    2. Valentina Aprigliano & Alessandro Borin & Francesco Paolo Conteduca & Simone Emiliozzi & Marco Flaccadoro & Sabina Marchetti & Stefania Villa, 2021. "Forecasting Italian GDP growth with epidemiological data," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 664, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    3. Andrea Carriero & Todd E. Clark & Massimiliano Marcellino & Elmar Mertens, 2021. "Addressing COVID-19 Outliers in BVARs with Stochastic Volatility," Working Papers 21-02R, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, revised 09 Aug 2021.
    4. Franky Juliano Galeano-Ramírez & Nicolás Martínez-Cortés & Carlos D. Rojas-Martínez, 2021. "Nowcasting Colombian Economic Activity: DFM and Factor-MIDAS approaches," Borradores de Economia 1168, Banco de la Republica de Colombia.
    5. David Kohns & Arnab Bhattacharjee, 2020. "Nowcasting Growth using Google Trends Data: A Bayesian Structural Time Series Model," Papers 2011.00938, arXiv.org, revised May 2022.
    6. Frank Schorfheide & Dongho Song, 2020. "Real-Time Forecasting with a (Standard) Mixed-Frequency VAR During a Pandemic," Working Papers 20-26, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    7. Danilo Cascaldi-Garcia & Thiago Revil T. Ferreira & Domenico Giannone & Michele Modugno, 2021. "Back to the Present: Learning about the Euro Area through a Now-casting Model," International Finance Discussion Papers 1313, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    8. Todd E. Clark & Gergely Ganics & Elmar Mertens, 2022. "Constructing Fan Charts from the Ragged Edge of SPF Forecasts," Working Papers 22-36, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    9. Chan, Joshua C.C. & Poon, Aubrey & Zhu, Dan, 2023. "High-dimensional conditionally Gaussian state space models with missing data," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 236(1).
    10. Fumio Hayashi & Yuta Tachi, 2023. "Nowcasting Japan’s GDP," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 64(4), pages 1699-1735, April.
    11. Andreini, Paolo & Hasenzagl, Thomas & Reichlin, Lucrezia & Senftleben-König, Charlotte & Strohsal, Till, 2023. "Nowcasting German GDP: Foreign factors, financial markets, and model averaging," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 298-313.
    12. Bobeica, Elena & Hartwig, Benny, 2023. "The COVID-19 shock and challenges for inflation modelling," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 519-539.
    13. Nicolo Maffei-Faccioli, 2020. "Identifying the Sources of the Slowdown in Growth: Demand vs. Supply," 2020 Papers pma2978, Job Market Papers.
    14. Serena Ng & Susannah Scanlan, 2023. "Constructing High Frequency Economic Indicators by Imputation," Papers 2303.01863, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2023.
    15. Kohns, David & Bhattacharjee, Arnab, 2023. "Nowcasting growth using Google Trends data: A Bayesian Structural Time Series model," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 1384-1412.
    16. Cristea, R. G., 2020. "Can Alternative Data Improve the Accuracy of Dynamic Factor Model Nowcasts?," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 20108, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    17. Daniel Hopp, 2021. "Economic Nowcasting with Long Short-Term Memory Artificial Neural Networks (LSTM)," Papers 2106.08901, arXiv.org.
    18. Mertens, Elmar, 2023. "Precision-based sampling for state space models that have no measurement error," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    19. Boriss Siliverstovs, 2021. "Gauging the Effect of Influential Observations on Measures of Relative Forecast Accuracy in a Post-COVID-19 Era: Application to Nowcasting Euro Area GDP Growth," Working Papers 2021/01, Latvijas Banka.
    20. Jack Fosten & Daniel Gutknecht & Marc-Oliver Pohle, 2023. "Testing Quantile Forecast Optimality," Papers 2302.02747, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2023.
    21. Bańbura, Marta & Belousova, Irina & Bodnár, Katalin & Tóth, Máté Barnabás, 2023. "Nowcasting employment in the euro area," Working Paper Series 2815, European Central Bank.
    22. Danilo Cascaldi-Garcia, 2022. "Pandemic Priors," International Finance Discussion Papers 1352, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    23. Kohns, David & Potjagailo, Galina, 2023. "Flexible Bayesian MIDAS: time‑variation, group‑shrinkage and sparsity," Bank of England working papers 1025, Bank of England.
    24. Paul Labonne, 2020. "Capturing GDP nowcast uncertainty in real time," Papers 2012.02601, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2021.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Nowcasting; Daily economic index; Dynamic factor models; Real-time data; Bayesian methods; Fat tails;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • E23 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Production
    • O47 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence
    • C32 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Time-Series Models; Dynamic Quantile Regressions; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models; Diffusion Processes; State Space Models
    • E01 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth; Environmental Accounts

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