Reconstructing a Short-Term Indicator by State-Space Models: An Application to Estimate Hours Worked by Quarterly National Accounts

ISTAT has recently released an updated version of short-term statistics on hours worked in Italy, which are used in labor input estimates by the Quarterly National Accounts (QNA). The coverage of these statistics has been expanded from larger-than-ten workers firms to include the entire universe of Italian private firms. To include the updated indicator within estimates by QNA, the series must be reconstructed back to 1995 first quarter (1995q1) due to methodological requirements of QNA. In this paper, we first reconstruct the updated indicator using the Kalman filter and smoother algorithms applied to a state-space representation of a multivariate structural model (SUTSE). Next, we comparatively assess the performance of the new indicator against the non-updated one. This assessment is based on estimates of quarterly per-employee hours worked using temporal disaggregation methods for seven economic sections spanning the non-agricultural private business economy over the period 1995q1 to 2020q4. Compared to the previous indicator, the reconstructed indicator (i) implies improvements in temporal disaggregation model fitting in the majority of economic sections considered; (ii) returns smaller forecast errors in the 64.3% of the estimations, based on MAE; (iii) ensures a higher correlation between the estimated quarterly series to the indicator in the 71.4% of the estimates.