Out-of-sample tests of forecast performance depend on how a given data set is split into estimation and evaluation periods, yet no guidance exists on how to choose the split point. Empirical forecast evaluation results can therefore be difficult to interpret, particularly when several values of...

The use of large-dimensional factor models in forecasting has received much attention in the literature with the consensus being that improvements on forecasts can be achieved when comparing with standard models. However, recent contributions in the literature have demonstrated that care needs...

This paper examines trends in annual temperature data for the northern and southern hemisphere (1850-2010) by using variants of the shifting-mean autoregressive (SM-AR) model of González and Teräsvirta (2008). Univariate models are first fitted to each series by using the so called QuickShift...

We document that over the period 1953-2011 US bond returns are predictable in expansionary periods but unpredictable during recessions. This result holds in both in-sample and out-of-sample analyses and using both univariate regressions and combination forecasting techniques. A simulation study...

This paper presents the Matlab package DeCo (Density Combination) which is based on the paper by Billio et al. (2013) where a constructive Bayesian approach is presented for combining predictive densities originating from different models or other sources of information. The combination weights...

We establish the equivalence between a commonly used out-of-sample test of equal predictive accuracy and the difference between two Wald statistics. This equivalence greatly simpli?es the computational burden of calculating recursive out-of-sample tests and evaluating their critical values. Our...

We examine US housing price forecastability using a common factor approach based on a large panel of 122 economic time series. We find that a simple three-factor model generates an explanatory power of about 50% in one-quarter ahead in-sample forecasting regressions. The predictive power of the...

We show that the adaptive Lasso (aLasso) and the adaptive group Lasso (agLasso) are oracle efficient in stationary vector autoregressions where the number of parameters per equation is smaller than the number of observations. In particular, this means that the parameters are estimated...

We propose a flexible model to describe nonlinearities and long-range dependence in time series dynamics. Our model is an extension of the heterogeneous autoregressive model. Structural breaks occur through mixture distributions in state innovations of linear Gaussian state space models. Monte...

Macroeconomic forecasting using factor models estimated by principal components has become a popular research topic with many both theoretical and applied contributions in the literature. In this paper we attempt to address an often neglected issue in these models: The problem of outliers in the...