This paper uses payments system data to study the impact on personal consumption expenditure, and therefore on economic activity, of occasional extreme events. The usual quarterly data supplied by central statistical agencies are of little use to policy makers for monitoring effects of...

Regression models sometimes contain a linear parametric part and a part obtained by reducing the dimension of a larger set of data. This paper considers properties of estimates of the interpretable parameters of the model, in a general setting in which a potentially unbounded set of other...

Understanding and measuring the relative roles of different causal channels between commodity prices and exchange rates has important implications in financial decision making, especially for market participants with short horizons. From a macroeconomic perspective, this can also be useful for...

We describe and assess the usefulness of a newly-constructed database of electronic payments, comprised of debit and credit card transactions as well cheques that clear through the banking system, as indicators of current GDP growth. Apart from capturing a broad range of spending activity, these...

Many non- and semi- parametric estimators have asymptotic properties that have been established under conditions that exclude the possibility of singular parts in the distribution. It is thus important to be able to test for absence of singularities. Methods of testing that focus on specific...

In hedonic regression models of the valuation of works of art, the age at which an artist produces a particular work, or an indicator variable for periods in his or her artistic career, is often found to have highly significant predictive value. Most existing results are based on regressions...

This paper applies new diagnostics to the Bank of England's pioneering density forecasts (fan charts). We compute their implicit probability forecast for annual rates of inflation and output growth that exceed a given threshold (in this case, the target inflation rate and 2.5% respectively.)...

This paper uses estimation techniques related to those of Galbraith and Zinde-Walsh (2000) for ARCH and GARCH models, based on realized volatility (Andersen and Bollerslev 1998, and others), to estimate the conditional quantiles of daily volatility in samples of equity index and foreign exchange...

A probabilistic forecast is the estimated probability with which a future event will satisfy a specified criterion. One interesting feature of such forecasts is their calibration, or the match between predicted probabilities and actual outcome probabilities. Calibration has been evaluated in the...

We consider the problem of determining the horizon beyond which forecasts from time series models of stationary processes add nothing to the forecast implicit in the conditional mean. We refer to this as the content horizon for forecasts, and define a forecast content function at horizons s = 1,...