We develop a closed economy model to study the interactions among sovereign risk premia, fiscal limits, and fiscal policy. The stochastic fiscal limits, which measure the ability and willingness of the government to service its debt, arise endogenously from a dynamic Laffer curve. The...

The paper explores the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal consolidations whose timing and composition - either tax- or spending-based - are uncertain. We find that the composition of the fiscal consolidation, its duration, the monetary policy stance, the level of government debt, and...

This paper contributes to the debate on fiscal multipliers, in the context of a structural model. I estimate a micro-founded dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, that features a rich fiscal policy block and a transmission mechanism for government spending shocks, using Bayesian...

The authors test the statistical significance of Pindyck’s (1999) suggested class of econometric equations that model the behaviour of long-run real energy prices. The models postulate meanreverting prices with continuous and random changes in their level and trend, and are estimated using...

We evaluate different approaches for using monthly indicators to predict Chinese GDP for the current and the next quarter (‘nowcasts’ and ‘forecasts’, respectively). We use three types of mixed-frequency models, one based on an economic activity indicator (Liu et al., 2007), one based on...

We address some of the key questions that arise in forecasting the price of crude oil. What do applied forecasters need to know about the choice of sample period and about the tradeoffs between alternative oil price series and model specifications? Are real or nominal oil prices predictable...

We construct a monthly real-time data set consisting of vintages for 1991.1-2010.12 that is suitable for generating forecasts of the real price of oil from a variety of models. We document that revisions of the data typically represent news, and we introduce backcasting and nowcasting techniques...

We propose alternative single-equation semi-structural models for forecasting inflation in Canada, whereby structural New Keynesian models are combined with time-series features in the data. Several marginal cost measures are used, including one that in addition to unit labour cost also...

We evaluate forecasts for the euro area in data-rich and ‘data-lean’ environments by comparing three different approaches: a simple PMI model based on Purchasing Managers’ Indices (PMIs), a dynamic factor model with euro area data, and a dynamic factor model with data from the euro plus...

The U.S. Energy Information Administration regularly publishes short-term forecasts of the price of crude oil. Traditionally, such out-of-sample forecasts have been largely judgmental, making them difficult to replicate and justify, and not particularly successful when compared with naïve...