From a theoretical point of view, uncertainty over the demand for a firm�s product may not have clear effects on investments, because of the influence of a number of factors, such as the production technology and the amount of competition in the product market.Until now, a deeper...

Assessing the global economic outlook is a fundamentally important task of international financial institutions, governments and central banks. In this paper we focus on the consequences of the rapid growth of emerging markets for monitoring and forecasting the global outlook. Our main results...

This paper proposes a simple procedure to obtain monthly assessments of short-run perspectives for quarterly world GDP and trade. It combines emerging and advanced countries� high frequency information to explain quarterly national accounts variables through bridge models. The union of all...

Quantile aggregation (or 'Vincentization') is a simple and intuitive way of combining probability distributions, originally proposed by S. B. Vincent in 1912. In certain cases, such as under Gaussianity, the Vincentized distribution belongs to the same family as that of the individual...

The size and power properties of several tests of equal Mean Square Prediction Error (MSPE) and of Forecast Encompassing (FE) are evaluated, using Monte Carlo simulations, in the context of dynamic regressions. For nested models, the F-type test of forecast encompassing proposed by Clark and...

Quantitative information on the current state of the economy is crucial to economic policy-making, but the quarterly national accounts data for GDP in the euro area are released with a significant delay. This paper presents alternative models for the real-time forecasting of euro area GDP and...

This paper considers forecasting by econometric and time series models using preliminary (or provisional) data. The standard practice is to ignore the distinction between provisional and final data. We call the forecasts that ignore such a distinction naive forecasts, which are generated as...