The primary goal of this paper is to describe several models that are currently used at the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia (NBRM) for short-term forecasting of inflation - Autoregressive integrated moving average models (aggregated and disaggregated approach), three equation...

Economic policies are generally formulated on the basis of data available in real time, which might subsequently be revised. Implicitly, the possibility of data revisions creates an element of uncertainty around the very same data driving policy decisions. Given that such uncertainty could be...

In this paper I have used copula functions to forecast the Value-at-Risk (VaR) of an equally weighted portfolio comprising a small cap stock index and a large cap stock index for the oil and gas industry. The following empirical questions have been analyzed: (i) are there nonnormalities in the...

When constructing unconditional point forecasts, both direct- and iterated-multistep (DMS and IMS) approaches are common. However, in the context of producing conditional forecasts, IMS approaches based on vector autoregressions (VAR) are far more common than simpler DMS models. This is despite...

In this paper, we estimate trend inflation in Sweden using an unobserved components stochastic volatility model. Using data from 1995Q4 to 2021Q4 and Bayesian estimation methods, we find that trend inflation has been well-anchored during the period - although in general at a level below the...

In this paper, we analyse Okun's law - a relation between the change in the unemployment rate and GDP growth - using data from Australia, the euro area, the United Kingdom and the United States. More specifically, we assess the relevance of non-Gaussianity when modelling the relation. This is...

This paper uses Bayesian techniques and Maltese data over the period 2001-2019 to estimate the parameters of MEDSEA-FIN, one of the Central Bank of Malta's DSGE models. The model captures linkages between the housing sector, banks and the rest of the economy via a borrowing collateral...

This paper presents a credit gap for Malta derived from a semi-structural multivariate filter. This modelling approach has several advantages over univariate approaches typically used, for example to construct the Basel gap. The multivariate filtering of observed data into trends and cycles is...

Several authors have shown that there exists a significant relationship between the term structure of interest rates and future changes in the rate of inflation. More recently, this relationship has been strengthened through the introduction of nonlinearities and regime shifts. This paper...

We suggest the use of an Internet job-search indicator (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt both our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more standard...