Forecasting near-term trends in the labour market

Harvey Daniell and Andre Moreira

The latest developments in the labour market are often central to monetary policy decisions. We outline a framework for mapping labour market indicators to near-term employment and pay growth, drawing on established insights from the ‘nowcasting’ literature. The key benefits of our approach are: the ability to map a range of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ indicators of different frequencies to quarterly official data; the empirical determination of how much weight to place on each indicator; and the ability to shift those weights flexibly as more data become available. This framework beats simple benchmark models in our labour market application.

Continue reading →

What’s in the News? Text-Based Confidence Indices and Growth Forecasts

Arthur Turrell, Nikoleta Anesti and Silvia Miranda-Agrippino.

As the American playwright Arthur Miller wrote, “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.” Using text analysis and machine learning, we decided to put this to test – to find out whether newspaper copy could tell us about the national economy, and in particular, whether it can help us predict GDP growth.

Continue reading “What’s in the News? Text-Based Confidence Indices and Growth Forecasts” →

Pumping Iron: How can metals prices help predict global growth?

Tom Wise

Estimates of GDP growth are published with a considerable lag – even in some major economies we still only have partial data on what GDP growth was in Q1 2018. So ‘nowcasting’ GDP using more timely indicators of economic activity is an important way of assessing the strength of the world economy in real time. Good indicators are timely, correlated with measures of world activity and should outperform simple benchmarks. Unlike other global indicators such as business surveys or trade data, metals prices are available minute by minute. They also tend to move closely with world GDP. This post assesses how well they perform at nowcasting world GDP.

Continue reading “Pumping Iron: How can metals prices help predict global growth?” →