The aim of this paper is to assess whether explicitly modeling structural change increases the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts. We produce real time out-of-sample forecasts for inflation, the unemployment rate and the interest rate using a Time-Varying Coefficients VAR with Stochastic...

This paper compares the predictive ability of the factor models of Stock and Watson (2002) and Forni, Hallin, Lippi, and Reichlin (2005) using a “large” panel of US macroeconomic variables. We propose a nesting procedure of comparison that clarifies and partially overturns the results of...