Data revisions to German national accounts: Are initial releases good nowcasts?

Till Strohsal and Elias Wolf

No 2019/11, Discussion Papers from Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics

Abstract: Data revisions to national accounts pose a serious challenge to policy decision making. Well-behaved revisions should be unbiased, small and unpredictable. This paper shows that revisions to German national accounts are biased, large and predictable. Moreover, using filtering techniques designed to process data subject to revisions, the real-time forecasting performance of initial releases can be increased by up to 17%. For total real GDP growth, however, the initial release is an optimal forecast. Yet, given the results for disaggregated variables, the averaging-out of biases and inefficiencies at the aggregate GDP level appears to be good luck rather than good forecasting.

Keywords: Revisions; Real-Time Data; German National Accounts; Nowcasting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 C53 C82 E66 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-ets and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/200977/1/1670193241.pdf (application/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:zbw:fubsbe:201911

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().