Drawing on recent empirical research, we study whether the international business cycle, as measured in terms of the output gaps of the G7 countries, has out-of-sample predictive power for gold-price fluctuations. To this end, we use a real-time forecasting approach that accounts for model...

We use a real-time boosting approach to study the time-varying out-of-sample informational content of various predictor variables (inflation rate, exchange-rate fluctuations, stock market returns and interest rates) for forecasting gold-price fluctuations. While the predictor variables have...

Economic theory predicts that, in a small open economy, the dynamics of the real price of gold should be linked to real interest rates and the rate of change of the real exchange rate. Using data for Australia, we use a real-time forecasting approach to analyze whether real interest rates and...

Confronted with a significant devaluation pressure on the euro, the European Central Bank (ECB) tried in the fall of 2000 to influence the dynamics of the euro through foreign exchange market interventions. In this paper, we analyze the effectiveness of the intervention policy of the ECB. To...

This paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium two-country optimizing model to analyse the consequences of international capital mobility for macroeconomic volatility. To this end, the dynamic macroeconomic effects of a monetary policy, a fiscal policy, and a labor supply shock are analysed....

Survey data of forecasts of the housing market may provide a particularly rich data environment for researchers and policymakers to study developments in housing markets. Based on the approach advanced by Elliott <italic>et al</italic>. (2005), we studied the properties of a large set of survey data of housing...

Based on the approach developed by Elliott <italic>et al</italic>. (2005), we found that the loss function of a sample of oil price forecasters is asymmetric in the forecast error. Our findings indicate that the loss oil price forecasters incurred when their forecasts exceeded the price of oil tended to be...

We use the term structure of forecasts of housing starts to test for rationality of forecasts. Our test is based on the idea that short-term and long-term forecasts should be internally consistent. We test the internal consistency of forecasts using data for Australia, Canada, Japan and the...

The cross-sectional dispersion of private-sector forecasts has been used in recent research on currency crises as a measure of uncertainty over expected fundamentals. We argue that the cross-sectional dispersion of private-sector forecasts need not only reflect uncertainty over expected...

We used the yen/dollar exchange-rate forecasts of the <italic>Wall Street Journal</italic> (WSJ) poll to analyse whether exchange-rate forecasters have an asymmetric loss function. To this end, we applied an approach recently developed by Elliott <italic>et al</italic>. (2005). We found that only few forecasters seem to form...