Recent articles suggest that a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) with shrinkage is a good forecast device even when the number of variables is large. In this paper we evaluate different variants of the BVAR with respect to their forecast accuracy for euro area real GDP growth and HICP...

This paper proposes a new method of forecasting euro area quarterly real GDP that uses area-wide indicators, which are derived by optimally pooling the information contained in national indicator series. Following the ideas of predictive modeling, we construct the area-wide indicators by...

This paper derives new theoretical results for forecasting with Global VAR (GVAR) models. It is shown that the presence of a strong unobserved common factor can lead to an undeter-mined GVAR model. To solve this problem, we propose augmenting the GVAR with additional proxy equations for the...

In this paper we assess the information content of seven widely cited early indicators for the euro area with respect to forecasting area-wide industrial production. To this end, we use various tests that are designed to compare competing forecast models. In addition to the standard...

Despite the fact that many aggregates are nonlinear functions and the aggregation weights of many macroeconomic aggregates are time-varying, much of the literature on forecasting aggregates considers the case of linear aggregates with fixed, time-invariant aggregation weights. In this study a...

This paper provides a general strategy for analyzing monetary policy in real time which accounts for data uncertainty without explicitly modelling the revision process. The strategy makes use of all the data available from a real-time data matrix and averages model estimates across all data...