GDP Solera: The Ideal Vintage Mix

We use the information in the successive vintages of GDE and GDI to obtain an improved timely measure of U.S. aggregate output by exploiting cointegration between the different measures taking seriously their monthly release calendar. We also combine all existing overlapping comprehensive revisions to achieve further improvements. We pay particular attention to the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, which, despite producing dramatic fluctuations, did not generate noticeable revisions in previous growth rates. Our results suggest that revised GDE estimates, unlike GDI ones, are increasingly precise and receive higher weights, but early estimates retain some influence.