{{ vm.title }}

Now-Casting Economics Limited (“Now-Casting”) is a specialist macro-economic research and forecasting business. The business was founded by a group of academic economists, led by professors Lucrezia Reichlin and Domenico Giannone, who have been at the forefront in the development of ‘nowcasting’ models. These econometric models are designed to predict the current state of the economy.

The company, which started trading in 2011, develops and runs advanced statistical models on its proprietary platform. These models run continuously, so that whenever new input data is published, all output data is immediately recalculated and delivered automatically to the company’s clients. These clients are mostly investment institutions, who pay an annual subscription fee and receive the models’ output data as a feed. The company also has some public sector clients and occasionally does project work, building and running customised models for clients.

The company’s nowcasting models generate predictions for all of the key real and nominal economic variables – e.g., GDP, CPI, industrial production, retail sales, exports, imports, etc. The models also predict all of the most widely followed macroeconomic surveys – such as the purchasing managers’ indices (PMIs). The series used as inputs are of multiple different frequencies – daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly – and are all publicly available. They are also all macroeconomic series; no company-specific data is used. In addition to forecasts of specific macroeconomic variables, the company also publishes economic activity and surprise indexes for each of the countries it covers.

At present Now-Casting has models for more than 30 of the world’s largest economies, including both advanced and developing economies, amounting to more than 80% of the world by share of GDP. This geographic scope continues to increase as new countries are added to the service each year.

The company employs a small team of research economists to maintain and develop the company’s models. As well as applying the nowcasting model to new countries, this team also works on the development of new models and the adaptation of existing models for different purposes.