Disagreement in inflation expectations observed from survey data varies systematically over time in a way that reflects the level and variance of current inflation. This paper offers a simple explanation for these facts based on asymmetries in the forecasters’ costs of over- and...

The use of large-dimensional factor models in forecasting has received much attention in the literature with the consensus being that improvements on forecasts can be achieved when comparing with standard models. However, recent contributions in the literature have demonstrated that care needs...

This paper presents the Matlab package DeCo (Density Combination) which is based on the paper by Billio et al. (2013) where a constructive Bayesian approach is presented for combining predictive densities originating from different models or other sources of information. The combination weights...

Macroeconomic forecasting using factor models estimated by principal components has become a popular research topic with many both theoretical and applied contributions in the literature. In this paper we attempt to address an often neglected issue in these models: The problem of outliers in the...

An important issue in modelling economic time series is whether key unobserved components representing trends, seasonality and calendar components, are deterministic or evolutive. We address it by applying a recently proposed Bayesian variable selection methodology to an encompassing linear...

EuroMInd-D is a density estimate of monthly gross domestic product (GDP) constructed according to a bottom–up approach, pooling the density estimates of eleven GDP components, by output and expenditure type. The components density estimates are obtained from a medium-size dynamic factor model...

In this work, we make use of the shifting-mean autoregressive model which is a flexible univariate nonstationary model. It is suitable for describing characteristic features in inflation series as well as for medium-term forecasting. With this model we decompose the inflation process into a...

In this paper, we discuss how to best exploit the information contained in spells that are in progress when an observation period begins, that is, left-censored and left-truncated duration data. We provide a survey of censoring and truncation mechanisms in event history models. We describe some...

Relations between economic variables can often not be exploited for forecasting, suggesting that predictors are weak in the sense that estimation uncertainty is larger than bias from ignoring the relation. In this paper, we propose a novel bagging predictor designed for such weak predictor...

We examine sentiment variables as new predictors for US recessions. We combine sentiment variables with either classical recession predictors or with common factors based on a large panel of macroeconomic and ?nancial variables. Sentiment variables hold vast predictive power for US recessions in...