In this paper we evaluate the Central Bank of Chile annual GDP growth forecasts over the period 1991-2009 using a real-time database. We compare the Central Bank of Chile forecasts with those of the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF), Consensus Forecasts, and simple time-series models. We...

Communication with the public is an ever-growing practice among central banks and complements their decisions of interest rate setting. In this paper we examine one feature of the communicational practice of the Central Bank of Chile (CBC) which summarizes the assessment of the Board about the...

In this paper the neoclassical convergence hypothesis is tested for the thirteen regions of Chile using crosssection and time-series techniques. Cross-section analysis in combination with a Bayesian Modeling Averaging strategy supports the convergence hypothesis, despite of some instability...

In this paper we define a family of tests for the Martingale Difference Hypothesis (MDH) based upon a shrinkage principle. Tests within this family are such that rejection of the null implies that forecasts from the alternative model, adjusted by a shrinkage factor, will display lower Mean...

In this paper we evaluate exchange rate predictability using a new framework developed by Giacomini and White (2004). In this new framework we test for conditional predictive ability rather than for unconditional predictive ability, which has been the usual approach thus far. Using several...

We evaluate inflation forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) of the Central Bank of Chile. Forecast errors for the period 2000-2008 show an excess of autocorrelation and a statistically significant bias at the end of the sample. We take advantage of the autocorrelation...

In this paper we focus on combining out-of-sample test statistics of the Martingale Difference Hypothesis (MDH) to explore whether a new combined statistic may induce a test with higher asymptotic power. Asymptotic normality implies that more power can be achieved by finding the optimal weight...

Inference about predictive ability is usually carried out in the form of pairwise comparisons between two competing forecasting methods. Nevertheless, some interesting questions are concerned with families of models and not just with a couple of forecasting strategies. An example of this would...