Nowcasting Swedish GDP with a large and unbalanced data set

Abstract

We evaluate pseudo-real-time out-of-sample nowcasts for Swedish GDP employing factor models and mixed-data sampling regressions with single predictor variables. These two model classes can handle the data irregularities of a ragged-edge sample and differing sampling frequencies. The results show that pooling of the nowcasts outperforms a simple benchmark, even though only very few of the underlying specifications achieve improved accuracy individually. Moreover, we assess the accuracy of the density forecasts, i.e., the uncertainty around the point forecasts. The post-crisis period after 2008 turns out to be a more difficult period to nowcast precisely. However, indicator variables prove more useful post-crisis as then the performance relative to univariate benchmarks improves.