This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

This paper proposes a measure of real-time inflation expectations based on metadata, i.e., data about data, constructed from internet search queries performed on the search engine Google. The forecasting performance of the Google Inflation Search Index (GISI) is assessed relative to 37 other...

Reflecting the nature of economic decisions, the error correction mechanism (ECM) in the error-correction representation of a system of co-integrated variables may arise from forward-looking behavior. In such a case, the estimated ECM coefficients may misleadingly appear to be insignificant or...

We propose a flexible GARCH-type model for the prediction of volatility in financial time series. The approach relies on the idea of using multivariate B-splines of lagged observations and volatilities. Estimation of such a B-spline basis expansion is constructed within the likelihood framework...

This chapter discusses estimation, specification testing, and model selection of predictive density models. In particular, predictive density estimation is briefly discussed, and a variety of different specification and model evaluation tests due to various authors including Christoffersen and...

In economics, common factors are often assumed to underlie the co-movements of a set of macroeconomic variables. For this reason, many authors have used estimated factors in the construction of prediction models. In this paper, we begin by surveying the extant literature on diffusion indexes. We...

In this chapter we discuss model selection and predictive accuracy tests in the context of parameter and model uncertainty under recursive and rolling estimation schemes. We begin by summarizing some recent theoretical findings, with particular emphasis on the construction of valid bootstrap...

This paper develops tests for comparing the accuracy of predictive densities derived from (possibly misspecified) diffusion models. In particular, the authors first outline a simple simulation-based framework for constructing predictive densities for one-factor and stochastic volatility models....

Forecasters and applied econometricians are often interested in comparing the predictive accuracy of nested competing models. A leading example of a context in which competing models are nested is when predictive ability is equated with "out-of-sample Granger causality". In particular, it is...

Very often in actual macroeconomic time series there are causes that disrupt the underlying stochastic process and their treatment is known as «linearization». In addition, variance non-stationarity is in many cases also present in such series and is removed by proper data transformation. The...