Expectations form the basis of economic decisions of market participants in an uncertain world. Sentiment indicators reflect those expectations and thus have a proven track record for predicting economic variables. However, respondents of surveys perceive the world to a large extent with the...

This paper examines the Taylor rule in five emerging economies, namely Indonesia, Israel, South Korea, Thailand, and Turkey. In particular, it investigates whether monetary policy in these countries can be more accurately described by (i) an augmented rule including the exchange rate, as well as...

The use of log-transformed data has become standard in macroeconomic forecasting with VAR models. However, its appropriateness in the context of out-of-sample forecasts has not yet been exposed to a thorough empirical investigation. With the aim of filling this void, a broad sample of VAR models...

The exchange rate fluctuations strongly affect the Russian economy, given its heavy dependence on foreign trade and investment. Since January 2014, the Ruble lost 50% of its value against the US Dollar. The fall of the currency started with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The impact of...

We use noncausal autoregressions to examine the persistence properties of quarterly U.S. consumer price inflation from 1970:1.2012:2. These nonlinear models capture the autocorrelation structure of the inflation series as accurately as their conventional causal counterparts, but they allow for...

We propose a noncausal autoregressive model with time-varying parameters, and apply it to U.S. postwar inflation. The model .fits the data well, and the results suggest that inflation persistence follows from future expectations. Persistence has declined in the early 1980.s and slightly...