We analyze the performance of Bayesian model averaged exchange rate forecasts for euro/US dollar, euro/Japanese yen, euro/Swiss franc and euro/British pound rates using weights based on the out-of-sample predictive likelihood. The paper also presents a simple stratified sampling procedure in the...

If oil exporters stabilize the purchasing power of their export revenues in terms of imports, exchange rate developments (and particularly, developments in the US dollar/euro exchange rate) may contain information about oil price changes. This hypothesis depends on three conditions: (a) OPEC has...

We investigate the effect of forecast uncertainty in a cointegrating vector error correction model for Switzerland. Forecast uncertainty is evaluated in three different dimensions. First, we investigate the effect on forecasting performance of averaging over forecasts from different models....

Recent articles suggest that a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) with shrinkage is a good forecast device even when the number of variables is large. In this paper we evaluate different variants of the BVAR with respect to their forecast accuracy for euro area real GDP growth and HICP...

A probabilistic forecasting method to predict thunderstorms in the European Eastern Alps is developed. A statistical model links lightning occurrence from the ground-based ALDIS detection network to a large set of direct and derived variables from a numerical weather prediction (NWP) system. The...

This paper illustrates that the generalized propensity score method can easily be applied with multiple continuous endogenous treatment variables. Consistency proofs carry over straightforwardly to this general case, and the approach is shown to work well in finite samples with various...

Nationwide health interventions are difficult to evaluate as contemporaneous control groups do not exist and before-after approaches are usually infeasible. We propose an alternative semi-parametric estimator that is based on the assumption that the intervention has no direct effect on the...

This paper analyzes house price data belonging to three hierarchical levels of spatial units. House selling prices with associated individual attributes (the elementary level-1) are grouped within municipalities (level-2), which form districts (level-3), which are themselves nested in counties...

P(enalized)-splines and fractional polynomials (FPs) have emerged as powerful smoothing techniques with increasing popularity in several fields of applied research. Both approaches provide considerable flexibility, but only limited comparative evaluations of the performance and properties of the...

Although building operating charges have turned out to be a major determinant of profitability for real estate investments, there is a noticeable lack of reports or studies that analyze these costs with state-of-the-art statistical techniques. Specifically, past studies usually assume linear...