This paper documents a new stylized fact of the U.S. greater macroeconomic stability of the last two decades or so. Using 131 monthly time series, three popular statistical methods and the forecasts of the Federal Reserve's Green book and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we show that the...

Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, but this fact is ignored in most work on consumer price inflation. Using a novel methodology grounded in theory, the ten sub-components of the consumer price index (excluding mortgage interest rates, or CPIX) for South Africa are modeled separately...

The aims of this paper are estimate and forecast the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, or NAIRU, for Brazilian unemployment time series data. In doing so, we introduce a methodology for estimating mixed additive seasonal autoregressive (MASAR) models, by the Generalized Method of...

Implications of nonlinearity, nonstationarity and misspecification are considered from a forecasting perspective. My model allows for small departures from the martingale difference sequence hypothesis by including a nonlinear component, formulated as a general, integrable transformation of the...

We argue that the current framework for predictive ability testing (e.g., West, 1996) is not necessarily useful for real-time forecast selection, i.e., for assessing which of two competing forecasting methods will perform better in the future. We propose an alternative framework for...

In this paper we study simple time series models and assess their forecasting performance. In particular we calibrate ARMA and ARMAX (where the exogenous variable is the system load) processes. Models are tested on a time series of California power market system prices and loads from the period...

This paper explores the forecasting abilities of Markov-Switching models. Although MS models generally display a superior in-sample fit relative to linear models, the gain in prediction remains small. We confirm this result using simulated data for a wide range of specifications by applying...

Our study supports the hypothesis of global non-stationarity of the return time series. We bring forth both theoretical and empirical evidence that the long range dependence (LRD) type behavior of the sample ACF and the periodogram of absolute return series and the IGARCH effect documented in...

In this paper we study two statistical approaches to load forecasting. Both of them model electricity load as a sum of two components – a deterministic (representing seasonalities) and a stochastic (representing noise). They differ in the choice of the seasonality reduction method. Model A...

In this paper, we develop a parametric test procedure for multiple horizon "Granger" causality and apply the procedure to the well established problem of determining causal patterns in aggregate monthly U.S. money and output. As opposed to most papers in the parametric causality literature, we...