DP14323 Nowcasting German GDP

Author(s):	Paolo Andreini, Charlotte Charlotte Senftleben-König, Thomas Hasenzagl, Lucrezia Reichlin, Till Strohsal
Publication Date:	January 2020
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Programme Areas:	Monetary Economics and Fluctuations
Link to this Page:	cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=14323

This paper develops a nowcasting model for the German economy. The model outperforms a number of alternatives and produces forecasts not only for GDP but also for other key variables. We show that the inclusion of foreign variables improves the model's performance, while financial variables do not. Additionally, a comprehensive model averaging exercise reveals that factor extraction in a single model delivers slightly better results than averaging across models. Finally, we estimate a "news" index for the German economy constructed as a weighted average of the nowcast errors related to each variable included in the model.