Based on a panel of annual data for 17 growth and inflation forecasts from 14 institutions for Germany, we analyse forecast accuracy for the periods before and after the Great Recession, including measures of directional change accuracy based on Receiver Operating Curves (ROC).We find only small...

Studies of bond return predictability find a puzzling disparity between strong statistical evidence of return predictability and the failure to convert return forecasts into economic gains. We show that resolving this puzzle requires accounting for important features of bond return models such...

Price movements in industrial metals such as copper and aluminum predict stock returns. Increasing industrial metal prices are good news for equity markets in recessions and bad news in expansions. A one standard deviation increase in industrial metal returns predicts a price drop of one and a...

Equity returns predict carry trade profits from shorting low interest rate currencies. Commodity price changes predict profits from longing high interest rate currencies. The gradual information diffusion hypothesis (Hong & Stein, 1999; Hong, Torous, & Valkanov, 2007) provides a ready explanation...

We develop a novel method to impose constraints on univariate predictive regressions of stock returns. Unlike the previous approaches in the literature, we implement our constraints directly on the predictor, setting it to zero whenever its value falls below the variable's past 12-month high....

We propose a new method to improve density forecasts of the equity premium using information from options markets. We obtain predictive densities from stochastic volatility (SV) and GARCH models, which we then tilt using the second moment of the risk-neutral distribution implied by options...

Bakshi and Panayotov (2013) find that commodity price changes predict profits from longing high interest rate currencies (long leg profits) up to three months later. We find that equity returns also predict carry trade profits, but from shorting low interest rate currencies (short leg profits)....