This paper analyses the forecasting performance of monetary policy reaction functions using U.S. Federal Reserve's Greenbook real-time data. The results indicate that artificial neural networks are able to predict the nominal interest rate better than linear and nonlinearTaylor rule models as...

In diesem Artikel prognostizieren wir Insolvenzwahrscheinlichkeiten von kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen, die bislang noch keine hinreichende Beachtung gefunden haben, obwohl diese Unternehmen besonders insolvenzgefährdet sind. Die Schwierigkeit bei der Insolvenzprognose von kleinen und...

In recent years, survey-based measures of expectations and disagreement have received increasing attention in economic research. Many forecast surveys ask their participants for fixed-event forecasts. Since fixed-event forecasts have seasonal properties, researchers often use an ad-hoc approach...

Since the influential paper of Stock and Watson (2002), the dynamic factor model (DFM) has been widely used for forecasting macroeconomic key variables such as GDP. However, the DFM has some weaknesses. For nowcasting, the dynamic factor model is modified by using the mixed data sampling...

Macroeconomic expectations of various economic agents are characterized by substantial cross-sectional heterogeneity. In this paper, we focus on expectations heterogeneity among professional forecasters. We first present stylized facts and discuss theoretical explanations for heterogeneous...

This text was written as part of the project Modelling of Complex Systems for Public Policy. It reviews the classical authors who jointly contributed to establish the elements of what could constitute a "science of complexity". Based on the original writings of these authors, the text discusses...

In this paper we apply statistical inference techniques to build neural network models which are able to explain the prices of call options written on the German stock index DAX. By testing for the explanatory power of several input variables serving as network inputs, some insight into the...