The interest in empirical studies of monetary policy has increased in the last decade. The deregulation of financial markets and the increased use of explicit policy rules and targets have made monetary policy more transparent and interesting for economic analysis. This paper demonstrates how a...

We use a vector error correction model to study the long-term relationship between aggregate expected default frequency and the macroeconomic development, i.e. CPI, industry production and short-term interest rate. The model is used to forecast the median expected default frequency of the...

We consider forecast combination and, indirectly, model selection for VAR models when there is uncertainty about which variables to include in the model in addition to the forecast variables. The key difference from traditional Bayesian variable selection is that we also allow for uncertainty...

The Swedish economy is strongly dependent on global economic developments, which is re‡ected in generally strong empirical relationships between Swedish and foreign macroeconomic variables. It is, however, diffi cult for standard open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE)...

A simple methodology is presented for modeling time variation in volatilities and other higher-order moments using a recursive updating scheme similar to the familiar RiskMetricsTM approach. We update parameters using the score of the forecasting distribution. This allows the parameter dynamics...

We consider a Bayesian Model Averaging approach for the purpose of forecasting Swedish consumer price index inflation using a large set of potential indicators, comprising some 80 quarterly time series covering a wide spectrum of Swedish economic activity. The paper demonstrates how to...

A simple methodology is presented for modeling time variation in volatilities and other higher-order moments using a recursive updating scheme similar to the familiar RiskMetrics(TM) approach. We update parameters using the score of the forecasting distribution. This allows the parameter...

We study the role of heterogeneity in the revenues of individual firms for euro area macroeconomic dynamics. To this end, we specify two models: a standard aggregate vector autoregressive model (VAR) and an "heterogeneous VAR" (HVAR). The VAR model includes only aggregate data, while the HVAR...

In this paper we examine whether data from business tendency surveys are useful for forecasting the macro economy in the short run. Our analyses primarily concern the growth rates of real GDP but we also evaluate forecasts of other variables such as unemployment, price and wage inflation,...