Economic policy makers, international organisations and private-sector forecasters commonly use short-term forecasts of real GDP growth based on monthly indicators, such as industrial production, retail sales and confidence surveys. An assessment of the reliability of such tools and of the...

This paper explores how changes in macroeconomic uncertainty have affected the decision to participate in the European Central Bank's Survey of Professional Forecasters. Two different approaches are employed in order to address this question. First, a time-series analysis explores if changes in...

Euro area GDP and components are nowcast and forecast one quarter ahead. Based on a dataset of 163 series comprising the relevant monthly indicators, simple bridge equations with one explanatory variable are estimated for each. The individual forecasts generated by each equation are then pooled,...

Rational expectations has been the dominant way to model expectations, but the literature has quickly moved to a more realistic assumption of boundedly rational learning where agents are assumed to use only a limited set of information to form their expectations. A standard assumption is that...

The issue of forecast aggregation is to determine whether it is better to forecast a series directly or instead construct forecasts of its components and then sum these component forecasts. Notwithstanding some underlying theoretical results, it is generally accepted that forecast aggregation is...

Projected demographic changes in industrialized countries will reduce the share of the working-age population. Analyses based on standard OLG models predict that these changes will increase the capital-labor ratio. Hence, rates of return to capital decrease and wages increase with adverse...

We introduce a structural quantile vector autoregressive (VAR) model. Unlike standard VAR which models only the average interaction of the endogenous variables, quantile VAR models their interaction at any quantile. We show how to estimate and forecast multivariate quantiles within a recursive...

Building on Beaudry, Nam and Wang (2011) - hereafter BNW -, we use survey data on consumer sentiment in order to identify the causal effects of confidence shocks on real economic activity in a selection of advanced economies. Starting from a set of closed-economy VAR models, we show that these...

Euro area GDP and components are nowcast and forecast one quarter ahead. Based on a dataset of 163 series comprising the relevant monthly indicators, simple bridge equations with one explanatory variable are estimated for each. The individual forecasts generated by each equation are then pooled,...