Measuring bias is important as it helps identify flaws in quantitative forecasting methods or judgmental forecasts. It can, therefore, potentially help improve forecasts. Despite this, bias tends to be under represented in the literature: many studies focus solely on measuring accuracy. Methods...

This article introduces lassopack, a suite of programs for regularized regression in Stata. lassopack implements lasso, square-root lasso, elastic net, ridge regression, adaptive lasso and post-estimation OLS. The methods are suitable for the high-dimensional setting where the number of...

This article introduces lassopack, a suite of programs for regularized regression in Stata. lassopack implements lasso, square-root lasso, elastic net, ridge regression, adaptive lasso and post-estimation OLS. The methods are suitable for the high-dimensional setting where the number of...

This paper analyses the contribution of survey data, in particular various sentiment indicators, to nowcasts of quarterly euro area GDP. It uses a genuine real-time dataset that is constructed from original press releases in order to transform the actual dataflow into an interpretable flow of...

Predictive power has always been the main research focus of learning algorithms with the goal of minimizing the test error for supervised classification and regression problems. While the general approach for these algorithms is to consider all possible attributes in a dataset to best predict...

We propose a new data-rich environment model of the yield curve, the macroeconomy, monetary policies and effective exchange rates for a panel of 11 countries: the iDREAM. The endogenous variables are observable (short- and long-term interest rates, exchange rates) and latent factors (economic...

Two new predictive screening tools that are based on analyzing records of over one-million people who experienced homelessness have been placed in the public domain by the Economic Roundtable. The two groups targeted by these tools are low-wage workers who have just lost their jobs and youth...

In this work, we rely on unconventional data sources to nowcast the year-on-year growth rate of Finnish indus-trial production, for different industries. As predictors, we use real-time truck traffic volumes measured automatically in different geographical locations around Finland, as well as...

In this paper we propose a hierarchical shrinkage approach for multi-country VAR models. In implementation, we consider three different scale mixtures of Normals priors — specifically, Horseshoe, Normal- Gamma, and Normal-Gamma-Gamma priors. We provide new theoretical results for the...