Summary
We investigate whether the KOF Economic Barometer – a leading indicator released by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute – is useful for short-term prediction of quarterly year-on-year real GDP growth in Switzerland. Using a real-time data set consisting of historical vintages of GDP data and the leading indicator we find that the model augemented with the KOF Barometer produces more accurate forecasts of the Swiss GDP than purely autoregressive models and consensus forecasts.
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We are grateful to Niklas Ahlgren, Marc Gronwald, Konstantin A. Kholodilin and to participants at the KOF Brown Bag Seminar (Zurich, Switzerland), the XIV Spring Meeting of Young Economists (Istanbul, Turkey) as well as the DIW End of Year Summit 2010 for constructive comments on an earlier draft of the paper. Two anonymous referees provided very insightful comments and suggestions that greatly helped to shape the manuscript. We also would like to thank Philip Hubbard for the permission to use consensus forecasts data in this paper. The usual disclaimer applies. All computations were performed using Ox version 6.0 (Doornik, 2007).
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Siliverstovs, B. The real-time predictive content of the KOF Economic Barometer. Swiss J Economics Statistics 147, 353–375 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399350
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399350