Researchers typically assume experimental subjects have rational expectations. If the object of the experiment is to learn the distibution of decision makers' types, then this amounts to assuming subjects' know the very thing the researcher wishes to learn. We propose a method of conducting...

In this paper, we investigate the role of the components of demographic change on economic development. Population growth has both positive and negative effects on income growth. Kelley and Schmidt (1995) states that high birth rates are costly in terms of growth but this effect can be offset by...

We analyze the properties of a bias-corrected realized variance (RV) in the presence of iid market microstructure noise. The bias correction is based on the first-order autocorrelation of intraday returns and we derive the optimal sampling frequency as defined by the mean squared error (MSE)...

This paper presents a rigurous framework for evaluating alternative forecasting methods for Chilean industrial production and sales. While nonlinear features appear to be important for forecasting the very short term, simple univariate linear models perform about as well for almost every...

Evaluation of forecast optimality in economics and finance has almost exclusively been conducted under the assumption of mean squared error loss. Under this loss function optimal forecasts should be unbiased and forecast errors should be serially uncorrelated at the single period horizon with...

A common problem in out-of-sample prediction is that there are potentially many relevant predictors that individually have only weak explanatory power. We propose bootstrap aggregation of pre-test predictors (or bagging for short) as a means of constructing forecasts from multiple regression...

In real time forecasting, the sample is usually split into an estimation period of R observations and a prediction period of P observations, where T=R+P. Parameters are often estimated in a recursive manner, initially using R observations, then R+1 observations and so on until T-1 observations...

The possibility of confusing long memory behavior with structural changes need to specify what kind of long memory behavior is concerned in literature and applications. One attraction of long memory models is that they imply different long run predictions and effects of shocks to conventional...

Filtering techniques are often applied to the estimation of dynamic latent variable models. However, these techniques are often based on a set assumptions which restrict models to be specified in a linear state-space form. Numerical filtering techniques have been propsed that avoid invoking such...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the weekend and holiday calendar effects are much stronger and statistically significant in volatility as opposed to expected returns. This paper seeks an explanation for this empirical finding by undertaking a comprehensive investigation of the predictive...