Surveying the forecasting practice of several central banks, we find that all these banks issue statements about risks to their macroeconomic forecasts. Often the balance of these risks is assessed as well. Upward [downward] risks to the forecast commonly imply that the outturn is expected to...

Macroeconomic risk assessments play an important role in the forecasts of many institutions. A risk forecast is related to the potential asymmetry of the forecast density. In this work, we investigate how the optimality of such risk forecasts can be tested. We find that the Pearson mode skewness...

To assess the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee decisions about the Official Bank Rate under forecast uncertainty, I estimate simple forecast-based interest rate rules augmented by the forecast standard deviations recovered directly from the Inflation Report fan charts. I find that...

Macroeconomic risk assessments play an important role in the forecasts of many institutions. However, to the best of our knowledge their performance has not been investigated yet. In this work, we study the Bank of England?s risk forecasts for inflation. We find that these forecasts do not...

We discuss how the welfare ranking of fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes in a New Open Economy Macroeconomics model depends on the interplay between the degree of exchange rate pass-through and the elasticity of substitution between home and foreign goods. We identify combinations of these...

This paper examines to what extent the build-up of 'global imbalances' since the mid-1990s can be explained in a purely real open-economy DSGE model in which agents' perceptions of long-run growth are based on filtering observed changes in productivity. We show that long-run growth estimates...

We show that including distribution costs into a general equilibrium model of international portfolio choice contributes to explaining the 'home bias' in international equity investment. Our model is able to replicate observed investment positions for a wide range of parameter values, even if...

In this paper Friedmann (1953) and Mundell´s (1968) position favouring flexible over alternative exchange rate regimes is reassessed in the context of international financial market integration. In a new open economy macroeconomic framework the paper shows that financial market integration...

We argue that a higher share of the private sector in a country's external debt raises the incentive to stabilize the exchange rate. We present a simple model in which exchange rate volatility does not affect agents' welfare if all the debt is incurred by the government. Once we introduce...

Empirical evidence suggests that a monetary shock induces the exchange rate to overshoot its long-run level. The estimated magnitude and timing of the overshooting, however, varies across studies. This paper generates delayed overshooting in a new Keynesian model of a small open economy by...