In this paper we face the fitting versus forecasting paradox with the objective of realizing an optimal Early Warning System to better describe and predict past and future sovereign defaults. We do this by proposing a new Regression Tree-based model that signals a potential crisis whenever...

This paper describes the group decision forecasting (or prediction) problem and explores a particular case of it. The case is that of what policy the Iranian government would implement for pursuing the war with Iran during the mid-1980s. This case is described in a well-known, if controversial...

Initial applications of prediction markets (PMs) indicate they provide good forecasting instruments in many settings, such as elections, the box office, or product sales. One particular characteristic of these “first-generation” (G1) PMs is that they link the payoff value of a stock's share...

The usual procedure for developing linear models to predict any kind of target variable is to identify a subset of most important predictors and to estimate weights that provide the best possible solution for a given sample. The resulting “optimally” weighted linear composite is then used...

Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much discussion in the context of modeling and identification of...

We forecast income growth over the period 2000-2050 in the US, Canada, and France. To ground the forecasts on relationships that are as robust as possible to changes in the environment, we use a quantitative theoretical approach which consists in calibrating and simulating a general equilibrium...

The foreign exchange reserves of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) countries have decreased since the fall of world oil price that began in July 2014. In fact, five of the six of the CEMAC countries are oil producers. Based on interrupted time series modeling, the...

Fiscal policy constitutes a key tool for business cycle stabilisation next to monetary policy. In this context, having a well-suited macroeconomic model for analysing fiscal policy at a central bank is of primary importance. This paper documents the fiscal block of the ECB-BASE, which is a...

The ad hoc Black-Scholes (AHBS) model is one of the most widely used option valuation models among practitioners models. The main contribution of this study is methodological. We have two main results: (1) we make the empirical observation that typically the call and put sneers are discontinuous...

This paper evaluates short-run out-of-sample exchange rate predictability with real-time data for 15 OECD countries from 1973 to 2013. We consider the Taylor rule fundamentals model, where the variables that enter the Taylor rule are used to forecast exchange rate changes, and the Taylor rule...