We propose a granular framework that makes use of advanced statistical methods to approximate developments in economy-wide expected corporate earnings. In particular, we evaluate the dynamic network structure of stock returns in the United States as a proxy for the transmission of shocks through...

We develop early warning models for financial crisis prediction by applying machine learning techniques to macrofinancial data for 17 countries over 1870–2016. Most nonlin-ear machine learning models outperform logistic regression in out-of-sample predictions and forecasting. We identify...

We nowcast world trade using machine learning, distinguishing between tree-based methods (random forest, gradient boosting) and their regression-based counterparts (macroeconomic random forest, linear gradient boosting). While much less used in the literature, the latter are found to outperform...

This paper analyzes the predictability of emerging market currency crises by comparing the often used probit model to a new method, namely a multi-layer perceptron artificial neural network (ANN) model. According to the results, both models were able to signal currency crises reasonably well...

Early-warning models most commonly optimize signaling thresholds on crisis probabilities. The expost threshold optimization is based upon a loss function accounting for preferences between forecast errors, but comes with two crucial drawbacks: unstable thresholds in recursive estimations and an...

We analyse the importance of macroeconomic information, such as industrial production index and oil price, for forecasting daily electricity prices in two of the main European markets, Germany and Italy. We do that by means of mixed-frequency models, introducing a Bayesian approach to reverse...

This paper develops Bayesian econometric methods for posterior inference in non-parametric mixed frequency VARs using additive regression trees. We argue that regression tree models are ideally suited for macroeconomic nowcasting in the face of extreme observations, for instance those produced...

We define nowcasting as the prediction of the present, the very near future and the very recent past. Crucial in this process is to use timely monthly information in order to nowcast key economic variables, such as e.g. GDP, that are typically collected at low frequency and published with long...

We propose a new method for medium-term forecasting using exogenous information. We first show how a shifting-mean autoregressive model can be used to describe characteristic features in inflation series. This implies that we decompose the inflation process into a slowly moving nonstationary...

This paper examines the out‐of‐sample forecast performance of sectoral stock market indicators for real GDP, private consumption and investment growth up to 4 quarters ahead in the US and the Euro Area. Our findings are that the predictive content of sectoral stock market indicators: i) is...