We provide new insights on the formation of inflation expectations - in particular at a time of great financial and economic turmoil - by evaluating results from a survey conducted from July 2009 through July 2010. Participants in this survey answered a weekly questionnaire about their short-,...

We empirically investigate how well different learning rules manage to explain the formation of household inflation expectations in six key member countries of the euro area. Our findings reveal a pronounced heterogeneity in the learning rules employed on the country level. While the expectation...

Formal testing and estimation of nonlinear relations require a substantial number of observations which are typically lacking in annual models. In this paper, a novel two-step procedure is introduced to model nonlinearities in yearly asset-price based leading indicator models for growth. In the...

We derive optimal weights for Markov switching models by weighting observations such that forecasts are optimal in the MSFE sense. We provide analytic expressions of the weights conditional on the Markov states and conditional on state probabilities. This allows us to study the effect of...

Traditional unobserved component models assume that the trend, cycle and seasonal components of an individual time series evolve separately over time. Although this assumption has been relaxed in recent papers that focus on trend-cycle interactions, it remains at the core of all seasonal...

This paper considers the problem of forecasting under continuous and discrete structural breaks and proposes weighting observations to obtain optimal forecasts in the MSFE sense. We derive optimal weights for continuous and discrete break processes. Under continuous breaks, our approach recovers...

This paper conducts a broad-based comparison of iterated and direct multi-period forecasting approaches applied to both univariate and multivariate models in the form of parsimonious factor-augmented vector autoregressions. To account for serial correlation in the residuals of the multi-period...

The first part of this paper is based on a study by Faust, Rogers and Wright (2004). They found someevidence of predictability of GDP revisions for the G-7 countrie s, especially for the UK, Italy and Japan. In this paper we investigate the quality of the first Dutch GDP releases by using the...

This paper considers forecast averaging when the same model is used but estimation is carried out over different estimation windows. It develops theoretical results for random walks when their drift and/or volatility are subject to one or more structural breaks. It is shown that compared to...

This paper examines the accuracy of short run forecasts of Dutch GDP growth by several linear statistical models and private sector analysts. We focus on the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and the dot-com recession of 2001-2002. The dynamic factor model turns out to be the best model. Its...