Small or medium-scale VARs are commonly used in applied macroeconomics for forecasting and evaluating the shock transmission mechanism. This requires the VAR parameters to be stable over the evaluation and forecast sample, or to explicitly consider parameter time variation. The earlier...

In this paper the e ects on aggregate consumption of changes in the age distribution of the population are analysed empirically. Economic theories predict that age influences individuals’ saving and consumption behaviour. Despite this, age structure e ects are rarely controlled for in...

We propose new forecast combination schemes for predicting turning points of business cycles. The combination schemes deal with the forecasting performance of a given set of models and possibly providing better turning point predictions. We consider turning point predictions generated by...

This paper compares alternative models of time-varying macroeconomic volatility on the basis of the accuracy of point and density forecasts of macroeconomic variables. In this analysis, we consider both Bayesian autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive models that incorporate some form...

Using a Bayesian framework this paper provides a multivariate combination approach to prediction based on a distributional state space representation of predictive densities from alternative models. In the proposed approach the model set can be incomplete. Several multivariate time-varying...