The paper analyses reasons for departures from strong rationality of growth and inflation forecasts based on annual observations from 1963 to 2004. We rely on forecasts from the joint forecast of the so-called "six leading" forecasting institutions in Germany and argue that violations of the...

This paper introduces new weighting schemes for model averaging when one is interested in combining discrete forecasts from competing Markov-switching models. In particular, we extend two existing classes of combination schemes - Bayesian (static) model averaging and dynamic model averaging - so...

We follow the idea of exploiting cross-sectional information to improve recession probability forecasts by aggregating indicator-specific turning point predictions to obtain economy-wide recession probabilities. This stands in contrast to most of the relevant literature, which relies on an...

This paper provides a full characterization of inflation rate forecasts using the mean values from Consensus Economics for a sample of 14 Latin American countries between 1989 and 2014. It also assesses the performance of inflation rate forecasts around business cycles' turning points. Results...

A large set of financial variables has only limited power to predict a latent factor common to the year-ahead forecast errors for real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, the unemployment rate, and Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation for three sets of professional forecasters: the Federal...

We use a machine-learning approach known as Boosted Regression Trees (BRT) to reexamine the usefulness of selected leading indicators for predicting recessions. We estimate the BRT approach on German data and study the relative importance of the indicators and their marginal effects on the...

For the timely detection of business-cycle turning points we suggest to use mediumsized linear systems (subset VARs with automated zero restrictions) to forecast the relevant underlying variables, and to derive the probability of the turning point from the forecast density as the probability...

This paper uses several macroeconomic and financial indicators within a Markov Switching (MS) framework to predict the turning points of the business cycle. The presented model is applied to monthly German real-time data covering the recession and the recovery after the financial crisis. We show...

We evaluate forecasts for the euro area in data-rich and 'data-lean' environments by comparing three different approaches: a simple PMI model based on Purchasing Managers’ Indices (PMIs), a dynamic factor model with euro area data, and a dynamic factor model with data from the euro plus data...