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A0951
Title: The real-time properties of the Bank of Canada's staff output gap estimates Authors:  Rodrigo Sekkel - Bank of Canada (Canada) [presenting]
Abstract: The revision properties of the Bank of Canada's staff output gap estimates since the mid-1980s are studied. Our results suggest that the average staff output gap revision has decreased significantly over the last 15 years, in line with recent evidence for the U.S. Alternatively, revisions from purely statistical methods to estimate the gap have not experienced the same drop in magnitude. We then examine the usefulness of real-time gap estimates for forecasting in inflation and find no deterioration in forecast performance when inflation projections are conditioned on real-time rather than final estimates of the gap.