IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ptu/wpaper/w201301.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Macroeconomic Forecasting Using Low-Frequency Filters

Author

Listed:
  • João Valle e Azevedo

Abstract

We explore the use of univariate low-frequency filters in macroeconomic forecasting. This amounts to targeting only specific fluctuations of the time series of interest. We show through simulations that such approach is warranted and, using US data, we confirm empirically that consistent gains in forecast accuracy can be obtained in comparison with a variety of other methods. There is an inherent arbitrariness in the choice of the cut-off defining low and high frequencies, but we show that some patterns characterize the implied optimal (for forecasting) degree of smoothing of the key macroeconomic indicators we analyze. For most variables the optimal choice amounts to disregarding fluctuations well below the standard business cycle cut-off of 32 quarters while generally increasing with the forecast horizon; for inflation and variables related to housing this cut-off lies around 32 quarters for all horizons, which is below the optimal level for federal spending.

Suggested Citation

  • João Valle e Azevedo, 2013. "Macroeconomic Forecasting Using Low-Frequency Filters," Working Papers w201301, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
  • Handle: RePEc:ptu:wpaper:w201301
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bportugal.pt/sites/default/files/anexos/papers/wp201301.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gary Koop & Simon M. Potter, 2003. "Forecasting in large macroeconomic panels using Bayesian Model Averaging," Staff Reports 163, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    2. Giannone, Domenico & Reichlin, Lucrezia & Small, David, 2008. "Nowcasting: The real-time informational content of macroeconomic data," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(4), pages 665-676, May.
    3. Valle e Azevedo, João & Pereira, Ana, 2013. "Approximating and forecasting macroeconomic signals in real-time," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 479-492.
    4. Marcellino, Massimiliano & Stock, James H. & Watson, Mark W., 2006. "A comparison of direct and iterated multistep AR methods for forecasting macroeconomic time series," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 135(1-2), pages 499-526.
    5. Domenico Giannone & Michele Lenza & Lucrezia Reichlin, 2008. "Explaining The Great Moderation: It Is Not The Shocks," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(2-3), pages 621-633, 04-05.
    6. Michael P. Clements & Ana Beatriz Galvao, 2009. "Forecasting US output growth using leading indicators: an appraisal using MIDAS models," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 24(7), pages 1187-1206.
    7. Ang, Andrew & Bekaert, Geert & Wei, Min, 2007. "Do macro variables, asset markets, or surveys forecast inflation better?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(4), pages 1163-1212, May.
    8. Domenico Giannone & Lucrezia Reichlin & David H. Small, 2005. "Nowcasting GDP and inflation: the real-time informational content of macroeconomic data releases," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2005-42, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    9. Fair, Ray C & Shiller, Robert J, 1989. "The Informational Context of Ex Ante Forecasts," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 71(2), pages 325-331, May.
    10. Clements,Michael & Hendry,David, 1998. "Forecasting Economic Time Series," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521634809.
    11. João Valle e Azevedo, 2007. "A Multivariate Band-Pass Filter," Working Papers w200717, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
    12. 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.
    13. Kim, Jae H., 2003. "Forecasting autoregressive time series with bias-corrected parameter estimators," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 19(3), pages 493-502.
    14. Margaret M. McConnell & Gabriel Perez-Quiros, 2000. "Output fluctuations in the United States: what has changed since the early 1980s?," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue Mar.
    15. Domenico Giannone & Lucrezia Reichlin & David Small, 2008. "Nowcasting: the real time informational content of macroeconomic data releases," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/6409, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    16. Clements, Michael P & Galvão, Ana Beatriz, 2008. "Macroeconomic Forecasting With Mixed-Frequency Data," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 26, pages 546-554.
    17. David F. Hendry & Michael P. Clements, 2004. "Pooling of forecasts," Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 7(1), pages 1-31, June.
    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. Zi‐Yi Guo, 2021. "Out‐of‐sample performance of bias‐corrected estimators for diffusion processes," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(2), pages 243-268, March.
    2. João Valle e Azevedo & Inês Maria Gonçalves, 2015. "Macroeconomic Forecasting Starting from Survey Nowcasts," Working Papers w201502, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.

    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. João Valle e Azevedo & Inês Maria Gonçalves, 2015. "Macroeconomic Forecasting Starting from Survey Nowcasts," Working Papers w201502, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
    2. Kuzin, Vladimir N. & Marcellino, Massimiliano & Schumacher, Christian, 2009. "Pooling versus model selection for nowcasting with many predictors: an application to German GDP," Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies 2009,03, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    3. Jennifer Castle & David Hendry & Oleg Kitov, 2013. "Forecasting and Nowcasting Macroeconomic Variables: A Methodological Overview," Economics Series Working Papers 674, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    4. Schumacher, Christian, 2016. "A comparison of MIDAS and bridge equations," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 257-270.
    5. Bec, Frédérique & Mogliani, Matteo, 2015. "Nowcasting French GDP in real-time with surveys and “blocked” regressions: Combining forecasts or pooling information?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 1021-1042.
    6. Ard Reijer & Andreas Johansson, 2019. "Nowcasting Swedish GDP with a large and unbalanced data set," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 57(4), pages 1351-1373, October.
    7. Schumacher Christian, 2011. "Forecasting with Factor Models Estimated on Large Datasets: A Review of the Recent Literature and Evidence for German GDP," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 231(1), pages 28-49, February.
    8. Massimiliano Marcellino & Christian Schumacher, 2010. "Factor MIDAS for Nowcasting and Forecasting with Ragged‐Edge Data: A Model Comparison for German GDP," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 72(4), pages 518-550, August.
    9. Kuzin, Vladimir N. & Marcellino, Massimiliano & Schumacher, Christian, 2009. "MIDAS versus mixed-frequency VAR: nowcasting GDP in the euro area," Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies 2009,07, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    10. Claudia Foroni & Massimiliano Marcellino, 2013. "A survey of econometric methods for mixed-frequency data," Working Paper 2013/06, Norges Bank.
    11. Elena Andreou & Eric Ghysels & Andros Kourtellos, 2013. "Should Macroeconomic Forecasters Use Daily Financial Data and How?," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(2), pages 240-251, April.
    12. Götz, Thomas B. & Hecq, Alain & Urbain, Jean-Pierre, 2016. "Combining forecasts from successive data vintages: An application to U.S. growth," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 61-74.
    13. Boriss Siliverstovs, 2017. "Short-term forecasting with mixed-frequency data: a MIDASSO approach," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(13), pages 1326-1343, March.
    14. Bańbura, Marta & Giannone, Domenico & Modugno, Michele & Reichlin, Lucrezia, 2013. "Now-Casting and the Real-Time Data Flow," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 195-237, Elsevier.
    15. Kuzin, Vladimir & Marcellino, Massimiliano & Schumacher, Christian, 2011. "MIDAS vs. mixed-frequency VAR: Nowcasting GDP in the euro area," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 529-542.
    16. Chudik, Alexander & Grossman, Valerie & Pesaran, M. Hashem, 2016. "A multi-country approach to forecasting output growth using PMIs," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 192(2), pages 349-365.
    17. Foroni, Claudia & Ravazzolo, Francesco & Rossini, Luca, 2019. "Forecasting daily electricity prices with monthly macroeconomic variables," Working Paper Series 2250, European Central Bank.
    18. Foroni, Claudia & Marcellino, Massimiliano & Schumacher, Christian, 2011. "U-MIDAS: MIDAS regressions with unrestricted lag polynomials," Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies 2011,35, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    19. Kyosuke Chikamatsu, Naohisa Hirakata, Yosuke Kido, Kazuki Otaka, 2018. "Nowcasting Japanese GDPs," Bank of Japan Working Paper Series 18-E-18, Bank of Japan.
    20. Chauvet, Marcelle & Potter, Simon, 2013. "Forecasting Output," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 141-194, Elsevier.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:ptu:wpaper:w201301. 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: DEE-NTD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bdpgvpt.html .

    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.