Working Papers present research work by both Danmarks Nationalbank’s employees and our partners. Working Papers are primarily targeted at professionals and people with an interest in central banking research as well as economics and finance in a broader sense.
Dankort payments as a timely indicator of retail sales in Denmark
The paper examines whether electronic payments by card (Dankort) provides a useful indicator for retail sales in Denmark. Dankort transactions data is availableabout one week after the reference month, while the retail sales index is only published about three weeks later. We add to previous work by setting up a modelfor the seasonally adjusted volume index for retail sales. The extensions considered are meant to further enhance the usefulness of the nowcasting modelfor conjunctural analysis. The out-of-sample forecasting ability of the model compares favourably with a benchmark autoregression.