Using the Consensus Economics dataset with individual expertforecasts from G7 countries we investigate determinants of disagreement (crosssectionaldispersion of forecasts) about six key economic indicators. Disagreementabout real variables (GDP, consumption, investment and unemployment)has a...

This paper discusses the paper "The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions" by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

Macroeconomic risk assessments play an important role in the forecasts of manyinstitutions. However, to the best of our knowledge their performance has notbeen investigated yet. In this work, we study the Bank of England’s risk forecastsfor inflation. We find that these forecasts do not...

In this papaer, we put DSGE forecasts in competition with factor forecasts. We focus on these two models since they represent nicely the two opposing forecasting philosophies. The DSGE model on the one hand has a strong theoretical economic background; the factor model on the other hand is mainly...

This paper compares the mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) and mixed-frequency VAR(MF-VAR) approaches to model speci…cation in the presence of mixed-frequency data,e.g., monthly and quarterly series. MIDAS leads to parsimonious models based onexponential lag polynomials for the coe¢ cients, whereas...

This paper discusses pooling versus model selection for now- and forecasting in the pres-ence of model uncertainty with large, unbalanced datasets. Empirically, unbalanceddata is pervasive in economics and typically due to di¤erent sampling frequencies andpublication delays. Two model classes...

Forecasting the world economy is a di¢ cult task given the complex interre-lationships within and across countries. This paper proposes a number ofapproaches to forecast short-term changes in selected world economic vari-ables and aims, …rst, at ranking various forecasting methods in terms...

Several authors have shown that there exists a significant relationship between the term structure of interest rates and future changes in the rate of inflation. More recently, this relationship has been strengthened through the introduction of nonlinearities and regime shifts. This paper...

In this paper we study the short term price behavior of December 2008 future prices for EU emissionallowances. We model returns and volatility dynamics of this price showing that a standard ARMA-GARCHframework is not adequate and that the gaussianity assumption is rejected due to the occurrence...

We propose an empirical approach to determine the various economic sourcesdriving the US yield curve. We allow the conditional dynamics of the yield at differ-ent maturities to change in reaction to past information coming from several relevantpredictor variables. We consider both endogenous,...