The papers in this special issue of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation cover the following topics: improving judgmental adjustment of model-based forecasts, whether forecast updates are progressive, on a constrained mixture vector autoregressive model, whether all estimators are born equal:...

This paper assesses the performance of a number of long-term interest rate forecast approaches, namely time series models, structural economic models, expert forecasts and combinations thereof. The predictive performance of these approaches is compared using out of sample forecast errors, where...

This paper has led to a publication in <I>Applied Financial Economics</I>, 2013, 23(9), 749-765.<P> This paper assesses the performance of a number of long-term interest rate forecast approaches, namely time series models, structural economic models, expert forecasts and combinations thereof. The...</p></i>

We introduce a Combined Density Nowcasting (CDN) approach to Dynamic Factor Models (DFM) that in a coherent way accounts for time-varying uncertainty of several model and data features in order to provide more accurate and complete density nowcasts. The combination weights are latent random...

We summarize the general combination approach by Billio et al. [2010]. In the combination model the weights follow logistic autoregressive processes, change over time and their dynamics are possible driven by the past forecasting performances of the predictive densities. For illustrative...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the 'Journal of Econometrics', 2013, 177(2), 213-232.<P> We propose a Bayesian combination approach for multivariate predictive densities which relies upon a distributional state space representation of the combination weights. Several...</p>

We propose new forecast combination schemes for predicting turning points of business cycles. The combination schemes deal with the forecasting performance of a given set of models and possibly providing better turning point predictions. We consider turning point predictions generated by...

As both the natural level of output and the New Keynesian output gap cannot be observed in practice, there is quite some debate on the question how these variables look like in practice. Rather than taking the standard approach of using a time trend or the HP-filter to obtain estimates of these...

Using a Bayesian framework this paper provides a multivariate combination approach to prediction based on a distributional state space representation of predictive densities from alternative models. In the proposed approach the model set can be incomplete. Several multivariate time-varying...

Interactions between the eurozone and US booms and busts and among major eurozone economies are analyzed by introducing a panel Markov-switching VAR model well suitable for a multi-country cyclical analysis. The model accommodates changes in low and high data frequencies and endogenous...