We use the term structure of forecasts of housing starts to test for rationality of forecasts. Our test is based on the idea that short-term and long-term forecasts should be internally consistent. We test the internal consistency of forecasts using data for Australia, Canada, Japan and the...

The cross-sectional dispersion of private-sector forecasts has been used in recent research on currency crises as a measure of uncertainty over expected fundamentals. We argue that the cross-sectional dispersion of private-sector forecasts need not only reflect uncertainty over expected...

We used the yen/dollar exchange-rate forecasts of the <italic>Wall Street Journal</italic> (WSJ) poll to analyse whether exchange-rate forecasters have an asymmetric loss function. To this end, we applied an approach recently developed by Elliott <italic>et al</italic>. (2005). We found that only few forecasters seem to form...

We use a nonparametric market-timing test to study the <italic>directional accuracy</italic> of survey forecasts of the prices of gold and silver. We find that forecasters have market-timing ability with respect to the direction of change of the price of silver at various forecast horizons. In contrast,...

We combined tests for speculative bubbles in stock markets with a cross-country regression framework to analyse whether economic and institutional variables can be identified that make speculative bubbles in stock markets more likely to occur. The list of variables that we found to have a...

The present-discounted value model of stock price determination implies that, rational bubbles being absent, stock prices and dividends should be cointegrated. The results of tests for noncointegration indicate that the possibility of periodically collapsing rational bubbles in the German stock...

We develop a simple two-country model to trace out conditions under which countries join the international fight against doping. We show that the support for an internationally coordinated anti-doping policy depends on the extent to which the rules of the anti-doping fight, as formulated by the...

We extend a basic real business cycle model to incorporate households doing sports. Households decide on spending time at the workplace and spending time on doing sports. Sports acts as an investment in health and, thereby, affects total factor productivity. We study the implications of sports...

We use a real-time boosting approach to study the time-varying out-of-sample informational content of various predictor variables (inflation rate, exchange-rate fluctuations, stock market returns and interest rates) for forecasting gold-price fluctuations. While the predictor variables have...