This paper has led to a publication in <I>Applied Financial Economics</I>, 2013, 23(9), 749-765.<P> This paper assesses the performance of a number of long-term interest rate forecast approaches, namely time series models, structural economic models, expert forecasts and combinations thereof. The...</p></i>

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <A href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0351.2011.00425.x/abstract;jsessionid=F64011DF99B22B6E2BF33FDA1C47DE9C.f04t03">'Economics of Transition'</A>, 2011, 19(4), 639-666.<P> Whether fiscal policy is sustainable depends on a government's future revenue and expenditure streams, both of which are highly uncertain. In commodity-rich countries, this problem is...</p></a>

See the publication in the 'Journal of Applied Econometrics' (2014).<P> We estimate the impulse response function (IRF) of GDP toa banking crisis, applying an extension of the local projectionsmethod developed in Jorda (2005). This method is shown to bemore robust to misspecification than...</p>

See the article in <I>Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (MATCOM)</I> (2013). Volume 93(c), pages 9-18.<P> Many macroeconomic forecasts and forecast updates like those from IMF and OECD typically involve both a model component, which is replicable, as well as intuition, which is non-replicable....</p></i>

In this paper, a set of neural network (NN) models is developed to compute short-term forecasts of regional employment patterns in Germany. NNs are modern statistical tools based on learning algorithms that are able to process large amounts of data. NNs are enjoying increasing interest in...

The papers in this special issue of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation cover the following topics: improving judgmental adjustment of model-based forecasts, whether forecast updates are progressive, on a constrained mixture vector autoregressive model, whether all estimators are born equal:...

This paper puts forward kernel ridge regression as an approach for forecasting with many predictors that are related nonlinearly to the target variable. In kernel ridge regression, the observed predictor variables are mapped nonlinearly into a high-dimensional space, where estimation of the...

Because of heterogeneity across regions, economic policy measures are increasingly targeted at the regional level. As a result, the need for economic forecasts at a sub-national level is rapidly increasing. The data available to compute regional forecasts is usually based on a pseudo-panel that...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <I>International Journal of Forecasting</I> (2013). Volume 29(4), pages 622-627.<P> It is common practice to evaluate fixed-event forecast revisions in macroeconomics by regressing current forecast revisions on one-period lagged forecast revisions....</p></i>

Most of the available monthly interest data series consist of monthlyaverages of daily observations. It is well-known that this averaging introduces spurious autocorrelation effectsin the first differences of the series. It isexactly this differenced series we are interested in when...