Seasonal influenza outbreaks and pandemics of new strains of the influenza virus affect humans around the globe. However, traditional systems for measuring the spread of flu infections deliver results with one or two weeks delay. Recent research suggests that data on queries made to the search...

It is a common understanding that bankruptcy is not a sudden occurrence for any organizations. Macro and micro economic studies have suggested numerous influential factors, which have substantial evidence toward firm's performance (Bekeris, 2012) and survivability (Nehrebecka & Dzik, 2013). With...

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...

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 quantifies the amount of noise and bias in analysts' forecast of corporate earnings at various horizons. We first show analyst forecasts outperform statistical forecasts at short-horizons, but underperform at longer horizons. We next decompose the relative accuracy of these forecasts...

This paper evaluates the out-of-sample performance of two stochastic models used to forecast age specific mortality rates: (1) the model proposed by Lee and Carter (1992); and (2) a set of univariate autoregressions linked together by a common residual covariance matrix (Denton, Feavor, and...

In this paper, we provide a novel way to estimate the out-of-sample predictive ability of a trading rule. Usually, this ability is estimated using a sample-splitting scheme, true out-of-sample data being rarely available. We argue that this method makes poor use of the available data and creates...

The prototypical Lee-Carter mortality model is characterized by a single common time factor that loads differently across age groups. In this paper, we propose a parametric factor model for the term structure of mortality where multiple factors are designed to influence the age groups...

The procedure for estimating probabilities of future investment returns using time-shifted indexes is based on the simple principle that a multi-dimensional conditional probability distribution can be envisioned involving investment total returns (for a single investment or a fixed portfolio of...

The procedure for estimating probabilities of future investment returns using time-shifted indexes is based on the simple principle that a multi-dimensional conditional probability distribution can be envisioned involving investment total returns (for a single investment or a fixed portfolio of...