Monetary policymakers and long-term investors would benefit greatly from a measure of underlying inflation that uses all relevant information, is available in real time, and forecasts inflation better than traditional underlying inflation measures such as core inflation measures. This paper...

The headline consumer price index (CPI) is often considered too noisy, narrowly defined, and/or slowly available for policymaking. On the other hand, traditional core inflation measures may reduce volatility but do not address other issues and may even exclude important information. This paper...

A common practice in studies using inflation forecasts is to approximate fixed-horizon forecasts with fixed-event ones. Here we show that this may be problematic. In a panel of US inflation forecast data that allows us to compare the two, the approximation results in a mean absolute...

We present new results for the likelihood-based analysis of the dynamic factor model that possibly includes intercepts and explanatory variables. The latent factors are modelled by stochastic processes. The idiosyncratic disturbances are specified as autoregressive processes with mutually...

We review the past 25 years of time series research that has been published in journals managed by the International Institute of Forecasters (Journal of Forecasting 1982-1985; International Journal of Forecasting 1985-2005). During this period, over one third of all papers_new published in these...

In this paper we design a simple trading strategy to exploit the hypothesized distinct informational content of the arithmetic and geometric mean. The rejection of cointegration between the two stock market indicators supports this conjecture. The profits generated by this cheaply replicable...

In most of the empirical research on capital markets, stock market indexes are used as proxies for the aggregate market development. In previous work we found that a particular market segment might be less efficient than the whole market and hence easier to forecast. In this paper we extend the...

Including disaggregate variables or using information extracted from the disaggregate variables into a forecasting model for an eco- nomic aggregate may improve the forecasting accuracy. In this paper we suggest to use boosting as a method to select the disaggregate variables which are most...

In the academic debate there is a broad consensus that house price fluctuations have a substantial impact on financial stability and real economic activity. Therefore, it is important to have timely information on actual and expected house price developments. The aim of this paper is to measure...

This paper aims to extract the common variation in a data set of 509 conjunctural series as an indication of the Belgian business cycle. The data set contains information on business and consumer surveys of Belgium and its neighbouring countries, macroeconomic variables and some worldwide...