This paper develops a method for producing current-quarter forecasts of GDP growth with a (possibly large) range of available within-the-quarter monthly observations of economic indicators, such as employment and industrial production, and financial indicators, such as stock prices and interest...

This paper presents evidence linking in-sample tests of predictive content and out-of-sample forecast accuracy. Our approach focuses on the negative effect that finite-sample estimation error has on forecast accuracy despite the presence of significant population-level predictive content. We...

Small or medium-scale VARs are commonly used in applied macroeconomics for forecasting and evaluating the shock transmission mechanism. This requires the VAR parameters to be stable over the evaluation and forecast sample, or to explicitly consider parameter time variation. The earlier...

Many forecasts are conditional in nature. For example, a number of central banks routinely report forecasts conditional on particular paths of policy instruments. Even though conditional forecasting is common, there has been little work on methods for evaluating conditional forecasts. This paper...

This paper compares alternative models of time-varying macroeconomic volatility on the basis of the accuracy of point and density forecasts of macroeconomic variables. In this analysis, we consider both Bayesian autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive models that incorporate some form...

This paper shows entropic tilting to be a flexible and powerful tool for combining medium-term forecasts from BVARs with short-term forecasts from other sources (nowcasts from either surveys or other models). Tilting systematically improves the accuracy of both point and density forecasts, and...

We propose a new algorithm which allows easy estimation of Vector Autoregressions (VARs) featuring asymmetric priors and time varying volatilities, even when the cross sectional dimension of the system N is particularly large. The algorithm is based on a simple triangularisation which allows to...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to enormous data movements that strongly affect parameters and forecasts from standard VARs. To address these issues, we propose VAR models with outlier-augmented stochastic volatility (SV) that combine transitory and persistent changes in volatility. The resulting...

VARs are a popular tool for forecasting and structural analysis, but ill-suited to handle occasionally binding constraints, like the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates. We extend the VAR framework by modeling interest rates as censored observations of a latent shadow-rate process,...