The signals approach as an early warning system has been fairly successful in detecting crises, but it has so far failed to gain popularity in the scientific community because it does not distinguish between randomly achieved in-sample fit and true predictive power. To overcome this obstacle, we...

This paper assesses the relative performance of central bank staff forecasts and of private forecasters for inflation and output. We show that the Federal Reserve (Fed), and less so the European Central Bank (ECB), has a significant information advantage concerning inflation and output...

Due to the recent financial crisis, the interest in econometric models that allow to incorporate binary variables (such as the occurrence of a crisis) experienced a huge surge. This paper evaluates the performance of the Qual VAR, i.e. a VAR model including a latent variable that governs the...