Emerging-market economies have become increasingly important in driving global GDP growth over the past 10 to 15 years. This has made timely and accurate assessment of current and future economic activity in emerging markets important for policy-makers not only in these countries but also in...

Notwithstanding a resurgence in research on out-of-sample forecasts of the price of oil in recent years, there is one important approach to forecasting the real price of oil which has not been studied systematically to date. This approach is based on the premise that demand for crude oil derives...

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset....

Increased sovereign credit risk is often associated with sharp currency movements. Therefore, expectations of the probability of a sovereign default event can convey important information regarding future movements of exchange rates. In this paper, we investigate the possible pass-through of...

We introduce a new approach for the estimation of high-dimensional factor models with regime-switching factor loadings by extending the linear three-pass regression filter to settings where parameters can vary according to Markov processes. The new method, denoted as Markov-switching three-pass...

This paper estimates a dynamic factor model (DFM) for nowcasting Canadian gross domestic product. The model is estimated with a mix of soft and hard indicators, and it features a high share of international data. The model is then used to generate nowcasts, predictions of the recent past and...

The answer as to whether there are gains from pooling real-time oil price forecasts depends on the objective. The approach of combining five of the leading forecasting models with equal weights dominates the strategy of selecting one model and using it for all horizons up to two years. Even more...

This paper introduces new weighting schemes for model averaging when one is interested in combining discrete forecasts from competing Markov-switching models. In particular, we extend two existing classes of combination schemes - Bayesian (static) model averaging and dynamic model averaging - so...

This paper shows that changes in market participants' fear of rare events implied by crude oil options contribute to oil price volatility and oil return predictability. Using 25 years of historical data, we document economically large tail risk premia that vary substantially over time and...

We use a new real-time database for Canada to study various output gap measures. This includes recently developed measures based on models incorporating many variables as inputs (and therefore requiring real-time data for many variables). We analyze output gap revisions and assess the usefulness...