EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Nowcasting and predicting data revisions using panel survey data

Troy Matheson (), James Mitchell and Brian Silverstone

Journal of Forecasting, 2010, vol. 29, issue 3, 313-330

Abstract: The qualitative responses that firms give to business survey questions regarding changes in their own output provide a real-time signal of official output changes. The most commonly used method to produce an aggregate quantitative indicator from business survey responses-the net balance or diffusion index-has changed little in 40 years. This paper investigates whether an improved real-time signal of official output data changes can be derived from a recently advanced method on the aggregation of survey data from panel responses. We find, in a New Zealand application, that exploiting the panel dimension to qualitative survey data gives a better in-sample signal about official data than traditional methods. Out-of-sample, it is less clear that it matters how survey data are quantified, with simpler and more parsimonious methods hard to improve. It is clear, nevertheless, that survey data, exploited in some form, help to explain revisions to official data. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1002/for.1127 Link to full text; subscription required (text/html)

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:jof:jforec:v:29:y:2010:i:3:p:313-330

DOI: 10.1002/for.1127

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Forecasting is currently edited by Derek W. Bunn

More articles in Journal of Forecasting from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley-Blackwell Digital Licensing () and Christopher F. Baum ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-26
Handle: RePEc:jof:jforec:v:29:y:2010:i:3:p:313-330