COVID-19 hit the economy in an unprecedented way, changing the data generating process of many series. We compare different seasonal adjustment methods through simulations, introducing outliers in the trend and seasonality to reproduce the heterogeneity in the series during COVID-19.
Real-time monitoring of the economy is based on activity indicators that show regular patterns such as trends, seasonality and business cycles. However, parametric and non-parametric methods for signal extraction produce revisions at the end of the sample, and the arrival of new data makes it difficult to assess the state of the economy. In this paper, we compare two signal extraction procedures: Circulant Singular Spectral Analysis, CiSSA, a non-parametric technique in which we can extract components associated with desired frequencies, and a parametric method based on ARIMA modelling. Through a set of simulations, we show that the magnitude of the revisions produced by CiSSA converges to zero quicker, and it is smaller than that of the alternative procedure.
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