Forecasting activities have historically played and will continue to play an important role in the Commission’s macro-economic activities. The European Commission Joint Research Centre contributes in the monitoring of macro-economic outcomes and in advising policy makers.
The Nowcasting group at JRC, in cooperation with partner institutions, develops econometric techniques and applies them for nowcasting and forecasting. Nowcasting techniques exploit data that become available in real time (including Big Data), so they can detect real time developments (for instance on GDP). This dashboard provides on the activities carried out with the group.
All content of this site is for expositional purposes, and does not include judgement. This website is a research website and should not be considered as representative of the European Commission’s official position. The European Commission shall not be liable for any consequence stemming from the reuse of this content.
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Mechanical (non-judgement) forecast of Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) based on a BVAR with optimized hyperparameters, as in Giannone et al. (2015), expanded to deal with mixed frequencies. Additional details in the section Model.
Select the following parameters:
- Model: unconditional BVAR or BVAR conditional on future scenarios
- Series: HICP, Core (HICP excl. Food & Energy), Energy, Non-Energy Industrial Goods, Services, Processed Food, Unprocessed Food
Last forecast update on
Generalized Impulse Response Functions (GIRFs)
Below are the model’s generalized impulse response functions. Choose one and click Download to save the PDF.
Constructing the inflation-news shock with LLM agents
We identify shocks to inflation expectations directly from newspaper coverage, extending the narrative-identification tradition by automating the reading of the press with large language models.
Step 1 — Unexpected events vs. salience
For each country and day, all inflation-related articles are pooled into a single daily bundle. A first model reads each bundle and separates genuinely new, price-driving events (an oil disruption, a tariff, a natural disaster) from mere salience — days that only discuss or comment on inflation without a new event. Only unexpected-event days pass to the next step.
Step 2 — The analyst–reviewer debate
Each unexpected-event bundle enters a debate between two agents. An analyst proposes whether the price development is strong, weak or ambiguous, and assigns a direction (higher or lower prices). A reviewer, acting as a senior analyst, audits the proposal for over- and under-classification. If they disagree, the analyst revises; every bundle is resolved within three rounds.
The signed series
Keeping only high-clarity, strong events, each day is scored +1 if the news points to higher inflation and −1 if lower. The chart below plots a 30 -day backward moving average of this signed daily series, one faint line per classification run. Robustness comes from re-running the whole pipeline under different prompts, model pairs and temperatures — the spread of the lines shows how little the measure depends on any single configuration. Use the button above to download the daily median across runs for the selected country.
Research
Events
The events were organized by the ‘Big Data and Economic Forecasting’ team within the Centre for Advanced Studies of the EC-JRC. The work is now carried out by the Nowcasting team:
- March 16-17, 2021: second Big Data and Economic Forecasting workshop: Agenda Recording Day 1 Recording Day 2
- May 16-17, 2019: first Big Data and Economic Forecasting workshop: Agenda Call for Papers
- June 11-12, 2018: kick-off workshop Big Data and Economic Forecasting Agenda
Peer-reviewed scientific publications
Selected publications on macro-economic fore/now-casting (including also the work carried out within the bigNOMICS prjoect):
2024
- Huber, Onorante, Pfarrhofer 202X. Forecasting euro area inflation using a huge panel of survey expectations, International Journal of Forecasting , forthcoming.
- Barbaglia, Manzan, Tosetti, 202X. Household Debt and Economic Growth in Europe, Macroeconomic Dynamics, forthcoming.
- Barbaglia, Consoli, Manzan, 2024. Forecasting GDP in Europe with Textual Data, Journal of Applied Econometrics , 39(2), 338-355.
2023
- Barbaglia, Consoli, Manzan, 2023. Forecasting with Economic News, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics , 41(3), 708-719.
- Barbaglia, Frattarolo, Onorante, Pericoli, Ratto, Tiozzo Pezzoli, 2023. Testing Big Data in a Big Crisis: Nowcasting under COVID-19, International Journal of Forecasting, 39(4), 1548-1563.
- Barbaglia, Manzan, Tosetti, 2023. Forecasting Loan Default in Europe with Machine Learning, Journal of Financial Econometrics , 21(2), 569–596.
- Huber, Koop, Onorante, Pfarrhofer, Schreiner, 2023. Nowcasting in a Pandemic using Non-Parametric Mixed Frequency VARs, Journal of Econometrics, 232(1), 52-69.
- Deiana, Mazzarella, Meroni, Tiozzo Pezzoli, 2023. The unexpected influencer: Pope Francis and European perceptions of the recent refugee crisis, Oxford Economic Papers, 75 (1), 75-95
2022
- Consoli, Barbaglia, Manzan, 2022. Fine-Grained, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis on Economic and Financial Lexicon, Knowledge-Based Systems , 247(8), 108781.
- Consoli, Tiozzo Pezzoli, Tosetti, 2022. Neural Forecasting of the Italian Sovereign Bond Market with Economic News, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society – Series A (Statistics in Society) , 185, (Suppl. 2), S197–S224.
- Tiozzo Pezzoli, Tosetti, 2022. Seismonomics: Listening to the Heartbeat of the Economy, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society – Series A (Statistics in Society) , 185 (Suppl. 2), S288– S309.
2021
- Consoli, Tiozzo Pezzoli, Tosetti, 2021. Emotions in Macroeconomic News and their Impact on the European Bond Market, Journal of International Money and Finance , 118, 102472.
- Hauzenberger, Huber, Onorante, 2021. Combining shrinkage and sparsity in conjugate vector autoregressive models, Journal of Applied Econometrics , 36(3), 304-327.
- Huber, Koop, Onorante, 2021. Inducing Sparsity and Shrinkage in Time-Varying Parameter Models, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics , 39(3), 669-683.
2020
- Crespo Cuaresma, Huber, Onorante, 2020. Fragility and the effect of international uncertainty shocks, Journal of International Money and Finance , 108(C), 102151.
All content of this site is for expositional purposes, and does not include judgement. This website is a research website and should not be considered as representative of the European Commission’s official position. The European Commission shall not be liable for any consequence stemming from the reuse of this content.
Nowcasting team
- Luca Onorante
- Luca Barbaglia
- Marco Ratto
- Luigi Longo
- Konstantin Boss
The Nowcasting team operates within the Economy and Finance unit at the European Commission Joint Research Centre.
E-mail: JRC-NOWCASTING@ec.europa.eu.
All content of this site is for expositional purposes, and does not include judgement. This website is a research website and should not be considered as representative of the European Commission’s official position. The European Commission shall not be liable for any consequence stemming from the reuse of this content.