ERSA and the School of Economics at the University of Pretoria invite you to attend a Training Workshop on Now-Casting economic variables in South Africa. The principal objective of the workshop is to train academics and practitioners on Now-Casting economic variables in South Africa.

ERSA and the School of Economics at the University of Pretoria invite you to attend a Training Workshop on Now-Casting economic variables in South Africa

Objective

The principal objective of the workshop is to train academics and practitioners on Now-Casting economic variables in South Africa.
The workshop will among other things address issues such as:

• Predict the present state of the economy, the near future, and the very recent past.
• Transform low frequency series (e.g. quarterly) into their high frequency component (e.g. monthly).
• Estimate a real time coincident indicator of the business cycle.

The guest lecturer is Prof Domenico Giannone from the Universite’ Libre de Bruxelles and the ECARES in Belguim.

Guest Lecturer

Domenico Giannone holds a PhD from the Universite’ Libre de Bruxells (ULB). He is Professor of Economics at the ULB where he teaches Econometrics. His general fields of research are forecasting, monetary policy, business cycles and growth. He has worked as Economist at the Monetary Policy Research Division of the European Central Bank and been Scientific Coordinator of the Euro Area Business Cycle Network. He has designed econometric models that are routinely used to inform policy decisions in many institutions including the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the European Central Bank, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Norges Bank. He is associate editor for the Journal of applied Econometrics and the International Journal of Forecasting and panel member for Economic Policy. He is co-founder of Now-Casting.com, a web-based forecasting company.

Workshop target audience

The workshop targets researchers and academics in the areas of monetary economics, fiscal and monetary policy, Real Business Cycle and DSGE modelling, and econometrics.
Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered for a limited number of participants from South African institutions.
Places are limited and funding to attend the workshop is entirely at the discretion of the workshop organizers.

Application to attend

Apply for participation by submitting a CV and short paragraph outlining your interest in the subject. Please send this to Yoemna Mosaval at yoemna.mosaval@econrsa.org by Friday 4 January 2013.
Workshop Convenor: Prof Alain Kabundi, Department of Economics, University of Johannesburg.