Replaced with revised version of paper 11/17/06. Former title: Forecasting Food Price Inflation, Challenges for Central Banks in Developing Countries using an Inflation Targeting Framework: the Case of Colombia

This paper investigates whether the accuracy of outlook hog price forecasts can be improvedusing composite forecasts in an out-of-sample context. Price forecasts from four wellrecognizedoutlook programs are combined with futures-based forecasts, ARIMA, andunrestricted Vector Autoregressive (VAR)...

The performance and economic value of public outlook forecasts has been of continuing interest to agricultural economists and market participants. This dissertation provide new and powerful evidence on the performance of outlook forecasts relative to futures prices in hog and cattle markets over...

Surveys of Professional Forecasters produce precise and timely point forecasts for key macroeconomic variables. However, the accompanying density forecasts are not as widely utilized, and there is no consensus about their quality. This is partly because such surveys are often conducted for...

En este artículo se introducen nuevos esquemas de ponderación para promediar de modelos econométricos cuando se está interesado en combinar predicciones de variables discretas provenientes de modelos con cambios de régimen markoviano. En una aplicación empírica, se pronostican los puntos...

Supporters claim that entrepreneurship is critical to building and sustaining the regional economies of urban and rural areas across the nation. Proponents argue that economic development practices that enhance and support entrepreneurship are essential because they cultivate innovation which,...

The development in the consumption of fruit andvegetables in the period 1999-2004 in Denmark wasinvestigated using quantile regression and two previouslyoverlooked problems were identified. First, the change in theten percent quantile samples decreased. This could have beencaused by changes in...

The purpose of the current paper is to explain how one can forecast the effect of an elected tax on saturatedfat on the demand for butter. The tax is to take affect from the first of January 2010 in Denmark. The tax is supposedto affect the consumption of saturated fat and especially high...

This article is concerned with the methodological question of frontier production functions estimation for agriculture, and the appropriateness of regression quantiles, as a useful semi-parametric approach. Better insights are reached using the proposed methodology that provides robust farm...

This paper examines the effects of farm characteristics and government policies in enhancing productivity growth for a sample of Greek farms, using a two-stage procedure. In the 1st-stage, non-parametric estimates of Malmquist index and its decompositions are computed, while a bootstrapping...