Oil Price Forecastability and Economic Uncertainty

Information on economic policy uncertainty (EPU) does matter in predicting oil returns especially when accounting for omitted nonlinearities in the relationship between these two variables via a time-varying coefficient approach. In this work, we compare the forecastability of standard, Bayesian and TVP-VAR models against the random-walk and benchmark AR models. Our results indicate that over the period 1900:1-2014:2 the time-varying VAR model with stochastic volatility outranks all alternative models.