The papers in this special issue of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation are substantially revised versions of the papers that were presented at the 2011 Madrid International Conference on “Risk Modelling and Management” (RMM2011). The papers cover the following topics: currency hedging...

Collectible postage stamp prices in the Netherlands witnessed a bubble in the late 1970’s, while prices rapidly floored in the mid 1980’s. We analyze 500 individual stamps prices (instead of a single index) to examine if the bubble could somehow have been predicted and whether there were...

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...

The uncertainty around monetary policy decision-making requires central banks to make extensive use of macroeconomic models both to analyze the current economic situation and to forecast the evolution of the main economic variables. The Small Economic Model (SEM) for Argentina describes in a...

The use of macroeconomic forecasting models is a common practice in central banks for monetary policy design, for the analysis of the current economic developments and for medium and long term forecasts. Among those models, the small-scale macroeconomic models stand out. Though relatively...

This article proposes a modified method for the construction of diffusion indexes in macroeconomic forecasting using principal component regres- sion. The method aims to maximize the amount of variance of the origi- nal predictor variables retained by the diffusion indexes, by matching the data...

This paper applies a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) approach to estimate the relative effects of housing and stock prices on US consumption over time. We use annual data from 1890 to 2012 and find that over different horizons and over time, generally the housing price...

This paper evaluates the ability of Bayesian shrinkage-based dynamic predictive regression models estimated with hierarchical priors (Adaptive Jefferys, Adaptive Student-t, Lasso, Fussed Lasso and Elastic Net priors) and non-hierarchical priors (Gaussian, Lasso-LARS, Lasso-Landweber) in...

This paper assesses the predictive ability of asset prices relative to other variables in forecasting inflation and real GDP growth in South Africa. A total of 42 asset and non-asset predictor variables are considered. Forecasts of inflation and real GDP growth are computed using both individual...

This paper employs classical bivariate, factor augmented (FA), slab and spike variable selection (SSVS)-based, and Bayesian semiparametric shrinkage (BSS)-based predictive regression models to forecast the US real private residential fixed investment series over an out of sample period of 1983Q1...