Assessing the informational content of card transactions for nowcasting retail trade: Evidence for Latvia

Abstract

We use a novel card transaction data maintained at the Central Bank of Latvia to assess their informational content for nowcasting retail trade in Latvia. During the COVID-19 pandemic in Latvia, the retail trade turnover dynamics underwent drastic changes reflecting the various virus containment measures introduced during three separate waves of the pandemic. We show that the nowcasting model augmented with card transaction data successfully captures the turbulence in retail trade turnover induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The model with card transaction data outperforms all benchmark models in the out-of-sample nowcasting exercise and yields a notable improvement in forecasting metrics. We conduct our nowcasting exercise in forecast-as-you-go manner or in real-time squared; that is, we use real-time data vintages, and we make our nowcasts in real time as soon as card transaction data become available for the target month.