Nowcasting Unemployment Insurance Claims in the Time of COVID-19

William Larson and Tara Sinclair

No 20-02, FHFA Staff Working Papers from Federal Housing Finance Agency

Abstract: Near term forecasts, also called nowcasts, are most challenging but also most important when the economy experiences an abrupt change. In this paper, we explore the performance of models with different information sets and data structures in order to best nowcast US initial unemployment claims in spring of 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that the best model, particularly near the structural break in claims, is a state-level panel model that includes dummy variables to capture the variation in timing of state-of-emergency declarations. Autoregressive models perform poorly at first but catch up relatively quickly. Models including Google Trends are outperformed by alternative models in nearly all periods. Our results suggest that in times of structural change there may be simple approaches to exploit relevant information in the cross sectional dimension to improve forecasts.

Keywords: land prices; price gradient; land value taxation; price dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C53 E24 E27 J64 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-for, nep-lab, nep-mac and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Nowcasting unemployment insurance claims in the time of COVID-19 (2022)
Working Paper: Nowcasting unemployment insurance claims in the time of COVID-19 (2020)
Working Paper: Nowcasting Unemployment Insurance Claims in the Time of COVID-19 (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hfa:wpaper:20-02

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