The difficulty of conducting relevant experiments has long been regarded as the central challenge to learning about the economy from data. The standard solution, going back to Haavelmo's famous "The Probability Approach in Econometrics" (1944), involved two elements: first, it placed substantial...

Economics places a high premium on completeness of explanation. Typical general-equilibrium accounts of economic phenomena are preferred to partial equilibrium accounts on the ground that important interactions are necessarily omitted in the latter. A similar preference for microfoundational...

Econometricians tend to hold simultaneously two views in tension with each other: an apparent anti-realism that holds that all models are false and at best useful constructs or approximations to true models and an apparent realism that models are to be judged by their success at capturing an...

A new class of regression type models termed essentially linear models is proposed. The class is characterized by geometric considerations. Within the class the distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator is easily approximated by a natural extension of the pstar-formula even though the MLE...

The forecasting literature has identi…fied two important, broad issues. The fi…rst stylized fact is that the predictive content is unstable over time; the second is that in-sample predictive content does not necessarily translate into out-of-sample predictive ability, nor ensures the stability...

This paper proposes forecast optimality tests that can be used in unstable environments. They include tests for forecast unbiasedness, efficiency, encompassing, serial uncorrelation, and, in general, regression-based tests of forecasting ability. The proposed tests are applied to evaluate the...

This paper provides a general framework that enables many existing inference methods for predictive accuracy to be used in applications that involve forecasts of latent target variables. Such applications include the forecasting of volatility, correlation, beta, quadratic variation, jump...

We propose new methods for comparing the relative out-of-sample forecasting performance of two competing models in the presence of possible instabilities. The main idea is to develop a measure of the relative ìlocal forecasting performanceî for the two models, and to investigate its stability...

We propose new information criteria for impulse response function matching estimators (IRFMEs). These estimators yield sampling distributions of the structural parameters of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models by minimizing the distance between sample and theoretical impulse...

This paper demonstrates that "commodity currency" exchange rates have remarkably robust power in predicting future global commodity prices, both in sample and out-of-sample. A critical element of our in-sample approach is to allow for structural breaks, endemic to empirical exchange rate models,...