Existing empirical evidence suggests that entrepreneurs are optimists, a finding researchers often interpret as evidence of a behavioral bias in entrepreneurial decision-making. We revisit this claim by analyzing an unusually large survey dataset (180,814 responses) that allows us to create a...

Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) models are developed to forecast industry employment for a resource-based economy. Two different types of input-output (I-O) information are used as priors: (i) a reduced-form I-O relationship and (ii) an economic-base version of the I-O information....

Cyclical, policy changes, and structural factors have been put forward to explain the decline in labour force participation in Canada in the 1990s. In the first article in the symposium, Pierre Fortin and Mario Fortin attempt to determine the relative importance of these three types of factors...

We investigate the potential for statistical forecasting of aggregate oil and gas investment on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). A unique and detailed dataset containing data from 109 different fields on the NCS between 1970 and 2015 was employed. A set of 1080 autoregressive distributed...

This paper assesses the performance of a number of long-term interest rate forecast approaches, namely time series models, structural economic models, expert forecasts and combinations thereof. The predictive performance of these approaches is compared using out of sample forecast errors, where...

This paper introduces macroeconomic forecasters as political agents and suggests that they use their forecasts to in uence voting outcomes. We develop a probabilistic voting model in which voters do not have complete information about the future states of the economy and have to rely on...

In diesem Papier evaluieren wir für 15 europäische Staaten, inwiefern Beschäftigungserwartungen die Prognosegüte des Erwerbstätigenwachstums verbessert. Unser Beobachtungszeitraum beginnt mit dem ersten Quartal 1998 und endet mit dem vierten Quartal 2014. Mit In-Sample- und...

The development of employment and unemployment in regional labour markets is known to spatially interdependent. Global Vector-Autoregressive (GVAR) models generate a link between the local and the surrounding labour markets and thus might be useful when analysing and forecasting employment and...

The empirical performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models is more than disappointing. This dismal result is also reflected in the forecasting capabilities of professional analysts: all in all, analysts are not in a position to beat native random walk forecasts. The root for this deficient...

It is broadly accepted that two aspects regarding the modeling strategy are essential for the accuracy of forecast: a parsimonious model focusing on the important structures, and the quality of prospective information. Here, we establish a Global VAR framework, a technique that considers a...