Despite the clear success of forecast combination in many economic environments, several important issues remain incompletely resolved. The issues relate to selection of the set of forecasts to combine, and whether some form of additional regularization (e.g., shrinkage) is desirable. Against...

Policymakers can take actions to prevent local conflict before it begins, if such violence can be accurately predicted. We examine the two countries with the richest available sub-national data: Colombia and Indonesia. We assemble two decades of fine-grained violence data by type, alongside...

Financial crises cause economic, social and political havoc. Macroprudential policies are gaining traction but are still severely under-researched compared to monetary and "fiscal policy. We use the general framework of sequential predictions, also called online machine learning, to forecast...

There exists significant hype regarding how much machine learning and incorporating social media data can improve forecast accuracy in commercial applications. To assess if the hype is warranted, we use data from the film industry in simulation experiments that contrast econometric approaches...

What are the prospects for long-run economic growth? The present study looks at a recently launched hypothesis, which I label Singularity. The idea here is that rapid growth in computation and artificial intelligence will cross some boundary or Singularity after which economic growth will...