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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We present a new way to model age-specific demographic variables with the example of age-specific mortality in the U.S., building on the Lee-Carter approach and extendingit in several dimensions. We incorporate covariates and model their dynamics jointly with the latent variables underlying...

We implement a long-horizon static and dynamic portfolio allocation involvinga risk-free and a risky asset. This model is calibrated at a quarterly frequencyfor ten European countries. We also use maximum-likelihood estimates andBayesian estimates to account for parameter uncertainty. We nd that...

While stochastic volatility models improve on the option pricing error when compared to theBlack-Scholes-Merton model, mispricings remain. This paper uses mixed normalheteroskedasticity models to price options. Our model allows for significant negative skewnessand time varying higher order...