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标题：Quantifying the qualitative responses of the output purchasing managers index in the US and the Euro area
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作者：Philip Vermeulen
期刊名称：Euro Area Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Statistics
印刷版ISSN：1830-3420
电子版ISSN：1830-3439
出版年度：2012
出版社：European Central Bank
摘要：The survey based monthly US ISM production index and Eurozone manufacturing PMI output index provide early information on industrial output growth before the release of the official industrial production index. I use the Carlson and Parkin probability method to construct monthly growth estimates from the qualitative responses of the US ISM pro- duction index and the Eurozone manufacturing PMI output index. I apply the method under different assumptions on the cross-sectional distribution of output growth using the uniform, logistic and Laplace distribution. I show that alternative distribution assump- tions lead to very similar estimates. I also test the performance of the different growth estimates in an out of sample forecasting exercise of actual industrial production growth. All growth estimates beat a simple autoregressive model of output growth. Distribution assumptions again matter little most of the time except during the financial crisis when the estimates constructed using the Laplace distributional assumption perform the best. My findings are consistent with recent findings of Bottazzi and Sechi (2006) that the distribution of firm growth rates has a Laplace distribution.
关键词：diffusion index; forecasting; Purchasing managers’ surveys; ISM; PMI;Qualitative response data; Carlson-Parkin method