Advances in nowcasting economic activity: The role of heterogeneous dynamics and fat tails

A key question for households, firms, and policy makers is: how is the economy doing now? This paper develops a Bayesian dynamic factor model that allows for nonlinearities, heterogeneous lead–lag patterns and fat tails in macroeconomic data. Explicitly modeling these features changes the way that different indicators contribute to the real-time assessment of the state of the economy, and substantially improves the out-of-sample performance of this class of models. In a formal evaluation, our nowcasting framework beats benchmark econometric models and professional forecasters at predicting US GDP growth in real time.