Dear colleagues, The Department of Economics cordially invites you to the WU Research Seminar in Economics on Wednesday, January 7th, with Kai Carstensen (https://www.stat-econ.uni-kiel.de/en/team/prof-dr-kai-carstensen?set_languag...) presenting: " Nowcasting consumer price inflation using high-frequency scanner data: evidence from Germany". Abstract: We study how millions of granular and weekly household scanner data combined with machine learning can help to improve the real-time nowcast of German inflation. Our nowcasting exercise targets three hierarchy levels of inflation: individual products, product groups, and headline inflation. At the individual product level, we construct a large set of weekly scanner-based price indices that closely match their official counterparts, such as butter and coffee beans. Within a mixed-frequency setup, these indices significantly improve inflation nowcasts already after the first seven days of a month. For nowcasting product groups such as processed and unprocessed food, we apply shrinkage estimators to exploit the large set of scanner-based price indices, resulting in substantial predictive gains over autoregressive time series models. Finally, by adding high-frequency information on energy and travel services, we construct competitive nowcasting models for headline inflation that are on par with, or even outperform, survey-based inflation expectations. * Date: Wednesday, January 7th * Time: 4.30 to 6 pm (CET) * Location: building D4, entrance A, ground floor, D4.0.133<https://campus.wu.ac.at/?q=D4.0.133> With best regards, Harald Oberhofer --- Univ.-Prof. Dr. Harald Oberhofer Department of Economics WU Vienna University of Economics and Business Phone: +43/1/31336-4984 Email: harald.oberhofer@wu.ac.at<mailto:harald.oberhofer@wu.ac.at> https://www.wu.ac.at/en/economics/people/oberhofer-h Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) Phone: +43/1/7982601-468 Email: harald.oberhofer@wifo.ac.at<mailto:harald.oberhofer@wifo.ac.at> http://www.wifo.ac.at/harald_oberhofer