Preliminary data on Russia's economic results of 2015, as well as the current trends in the global energy market, give grounds for revising down possible scenarios for Russia's economy in 2016-2017. For instance, a scenario of yearly average oil prices staying at $35 a barrel in 2016 is now the...

"This paper describes a Bayesian specification procedure used to generate a vector autoregressive model for forecasting macroeconomic variables. The specification search is over parameters of a prior. This quasi-Bayesian approach is viewed as a flexible tool for constructing a filter which...