Nowcasting Mexico’s Short-Term GDP Growth in Real-Time: A Factor Model versus Professional Forecasters
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We introduce a novel real-time database for the Mexican economy and propose a small-scale mixed-frequency dynamic factor model for nowcasting Mexico’s short-term GDP growth in real-time. We compare our factor-based backcasts, nowcasts, and forecasts with those of the consensus of the survey of professional forecasters during the period from the second quarter of 2008 through the second quarter of 2014. Our results suggest that our factor-based backcasts, nowcasts, and forecasts outperform those of the consensus of professional forecasters in real-time comparisons despite some structural instability during the 2008–09 crisis and its aftermath in 2010.
 JEL Classification: C53, E27, E37
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it