What is Now-Casting?
Now-casting is defined as the prediction of the present, the very near future and the very recent past. More broadly we can define it as the exercise of reading, through the lenses of a model, the flow of data releases in real time. The term is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long-time in meteorology. The first paper which used this term in economics and provided a methodology to implement it is Giannone, Reichlin, and Small, 2008.