Nowcasting Finnish real economic activity: a machine learning approach

Paolo Fornaro and Henri Luomaranta
Additional contact information
Henri Luomaranta: Research Institute of the Finnish Economy

Empirical Economics, 2020, vol. 58, issue 1, No 4, 55-71

Abstract: Abstract We develop a nowcasting framework, based on microlevel data, to provide faster estimates of the Finnish monthly real economic activity indicator, the Trend Indicator of Output (TIO), and of quarterly GDP. We use firm-level turnovers, which are available shortly after the end of the reference month, and real-time traffic volumes data, to form our set of predictors. We rely on combinations of nowcasts obtained from a range of statistical models and machine learning techniques which are able to handle high-dimensional information sets. The results of our pseudo-real-time analysis indicate that a simple nowcast combination based on these models provides faster estimates of TIO and GDP, without increasing substantially the revision error.

Keywords: Flash estimates; Machine learning; Microlevel data; Nowcasting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 C55 E37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00181-019-01809-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:empeco:v:58:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s00181-019-01809-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-019-01809-y

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().