We compare a number of data-rich prediction methods that are widely used in macroeconomic forecasting with a lesser known alternative: partial least squares (PLS) regression. In this method, linear, orthogonal combinations of a large number of predictor variables are constructed such that the...

Factor based forecasting has been at the forefront of developments in the macroeconometric forecasting literature in the recent past. Despite the flurry of activity in the area, a number of specification issues such as the choice of the number of factors in the forecasting regression, the...

We propose a new approach to forecasting the term structure of interest rates, which allows to efficiently extract the information contained in a large panel of yields. In particular, we use a large Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) with an optimal amount of shrinkage towards univariate AR...

A financial conditions index (FCI) is designed to summarise the state of financial markets. Two are constructed with UK data. The first is the first principal component of a set of financial indicators. The second comes from a new approach taking information from a large set of macroeconomic...

The online Supplement presents the proof the auxiliary Lemmas 1-6, the entire set of tables with results from the Monte Carlo and the empirical studies, and further discussion on selected topics.Full paper is available at: 'https://ssrn.com/abstract=2707176' https://ssrn.com/abstract=2707176

Forecasts play a critical role at inflation-targeting central banks, such as the Bank of England. Breaks in the forecast performance of a model can potentially incur important policy costs. Commonly used statistical procedures, however, implicitly put a lot of weight on type I errors (or false...