Despite their widespread use as predictors of the spot price of oil, oil futures prices tend to be less accurate in the mean-squared prediction error sense than no-change forecasts. This result is driven by the variability of the futures price about the spot price, as captured by the oil futures...

We show that the effects of overfitting and underfitting a vector autoregressive (VAR) model are strongly asymmetric for VAR summary statistics involving higher-order dynamics (such as impulse response functions, variance decompositions, or long-run forecasts) . Underfit models often...

We propose a Bayesian framework in which the uncertainty about the half-life of deviations from purchasing power parity can be quantified. Based on the responses to a survey study, we propose a prior probability distribution for the half-life under the recent float intended to capture widely...