Hansson, Jesper (National Institute of Economic Research) Jansson, Per (National Institute of Economic Research) Löf, Mårten (National Institute of Economic Research)
Additional information is available for the following
registered author(s):
In this paper we examine whether data from business tendency surveys are useful for forecasting the macro economy in the short run. Our analyses primarily concern the growth rates of real GDP but we also evaluate forecasts of other variables such as unemployment, price and wage inflation, interest rates, and exchange-rate changes. The starting point is a so-called dynamic factor model (DFM), which is used both as a framework for dimension reduction in forecasting and as a procedure for filtering out unimportant idiosyncratic noise in the underlying survey data. In this way, it is possible to model a rather large number of noise-reduced survey variables in a parsimoniously parameterised vector autoregression (VAR). To assess the forecasting performance of the procedure, comparisons are made with VARs that either use the survey variables directly, are based on macro variables only, or use other popular summary indices of economic activity. As concerns forecasts of GDP growth, the procedure turns out to outperform the competing alternatives in most cases. For the other macro variables, the evidence is more mixed, suggesting in particular that there often is little difference between the DFM-based indicators and the popular summary indices of economic activity.
Download Info
To our knowledge, this item is not available for
download. To find whether it is available, there are three
options:
1. Check below under "Related research" whether another version of this item is available online.
2. Check on the provider's web page
whether it is in fact available.
3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be
available.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Institute of Economic Research in its series Working Paper with number
84.
Length: 51 pages Date of creation: 28 May 2003 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:hhs:nierwp:0084
Contact details of provider: Postal: National Institute of Economic Research, P.O. Box 3116, SE-103 62 Stockholm, Sweden Phone: 46-(0)8-453 59 00 Fax: 46-(0)8-453 59 80 Email: Web page: http://www.konj.se/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Britta Larsson).
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)
Cited by: (explanations, 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.)