Now-casting and the real-time data flow

The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long time in meteorology and recently also in economics. In this chapter we survey recent developments in economic now-casting with special focus on those models that formalize key features of how market participants and policymakers read macroeconomic data releases in real-time, which involves monitoring many data, forming expectations about them and revising the assessment on the state of the economy whenever realizations diverge sizeably from those expectations. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.SCOPUS: ar.k