Asymmetric Uncertainty: Nowcasting Using Skewness in Real-time Data

Paul Labonne ()

Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) Discussion Papers from Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE)

Abstract: This paper presents a new way to account for downside and upside risks when producing density nowcasts of GDP growth. The approach relies on modelling location, scale and shape common factors in real-time macroeconomic data. While movements in the location generate shifts in the central part of the predictive density, the scale controls its dispersion (akin to general uncertainty) and the shape its asymmetry, or skewness (akin to downside and upside risks). The empirical application is centred on US GDP growth and the real-time data come from Fred-MD. The results show that there is more to real-time data than their levels or means: their dispersion and asymmetry provide valuable information for nowcasting economic activity. Scale and shape common factors (i) yield more reliable measures of uncertainty and (ii) improve precision when macroeconomic uncertainty is at its peak.

Keywords: density nowcasting; downside risk; fred-md; nowcasting uncertainty; score driven models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 C53 E66 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://escoe-website.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/ ... ESCoE-DP-2022-23.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nsr:escoed:escoe-dp-2022-23

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) Discussion Papers from Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) King's College London Strand London WC2R 2LS. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ESCoE Centre Manager ().