How well-behaved are revisions to quarterly fiscal data in the euro area?

Krzysztof Bańkowski, Thomas Faria and Robert Schall

No 2676, Working Paper Series from European Central Bank

Abstract: Since most macroeconomic data are revised after the initial release both researchers andpolicy-makers have no choice rather than recognising and understanding the revisions. Thispaper analyses revisions to the fiscal data in the euro area, also by contrasting them with the’better-understood’ macro revisions. Concretely, the study verifies whether fiscal revisionsfulfil requirements to treat them as well-behaved. To this end, we construct a fiscal quarterlyreal-time dataset, which contains quarterly releases of Government Finance Statistics andwhich is supplemented by macro variables from Main National Accounts. Fiscal revisionsdo not satisfy desirable properties expected from well-behaved revisions. In particular, theytend to have a positive bias, they exhibit a big dispersion and they are largely predictable.Also, they are similar to macro revisions, in particular since 2014, which contradicts theoften heard view about fiscal data being subject to particularly large revisions. JEL Classification: C80, E62

Keywords: data revisions; Fiscal policy; real-time data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
Note: 2648110
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2676~65f27f7ac1.en.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:ecb:ecbwps:20222676

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from European Central Bank 60640 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Official Publications ().