This paper compares the forecasting ability of five alternative types of models in predicting four key macroeconomic variables, namely, per capita growth rate, the CPI inflation, the money market rate, and the growth rate of the nominal effective exchange rate for the South African economy....

Recently, there has been increased interest in real-time forecasts of the real price of crude oil. Standard oil price forecasts based on reduced-form regressions or based on oil futures prices do not allow consumers of forecasts to explore how much the forecast would change relative to the...

We construct a monthly real-time data set consisting of vintages for 1991.1-2010.12 that is suitable for generating forecasts of the real price of oil from a variety of models. We document that revisions of the data typically represent news, and we introduce backcasting and nowcasting techniques...

This paper uses Dynamic Factor Models (DFMs), estimated under both classical and Bayesian assumptions, which accommodates a large cross-section of macroeconomic time series for forecasting per capita growth rate, inflation, and the nominal short-term interest rate for the South African economy....

This paper uses the Dynamic Factor Model (DFM) framework, which accommodates a large cross-section of macroeconomic time series for forecasting regional house price inflation. As a case study, we use data on house price inflation for five metropolitan areas of South Africa. The DFM used in this...

This paper evaluates the performance of 11 vector autoregressive models in forecasting 15 macroeconomic variables for the Indian economy over the 2007:01 to 2011:10 out-of-sample period. We consider 3 classical VARs, 4 Bayesian VARs and 4 Bayesian Factor Augmented VARs. Comparing the performance...

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about market expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because the presence of a timevarying risk premium often renders the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of...

Recent research has shown that recursive real-time VAR forecasts of the real price of oil tend to be more accurate than forecasts based on oil futures prices of the type commonly employed by central banks worldwide. Such monthly forecasts, however, differ in several important dimensions from the...

This paper uses the Dynamic Factor Model (DFM) framework, which accommodates a large cross-section of macroeconomic time series for forecasting regional house price inflation. As a case study, we use data on house price inflation for five metropolitan areas of South Africa. The DFM used in this...

This paper uses large Factor Models (FMs) which accommodates a large cross-section of macroeconomic time series for forecasting per capita growth rate, inflation, and the nominal short-term interest rate for the South African economy. The FMs used in this study contains 267 quarterly series...