Aim: In order to address the question whether a more sustainable society requires a change of purpose or a change of system, we must first resolve the issue of human agency. Is humanity free to choose its own destiny, or is humanity’s future determined by contingency of conditions and choices...

This paper considers the problem of forecasting real and financial macroeconomic variables across a large number of countries in the global economy. To this end, a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model previously estimated over the 1979:Q1–2003:Q4 period by Dees, de Mauro, Pesaran, and...

Forecasting the world economy is a difficult task given the complex interrelationships within and across countries. This paper proposes a number of approaches to forecast short-term changes in selected world economic variables and aims, first, at ranking various forecasting methods in terms of...

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of carry trade strategies during and after the financial crisis using a flexible approach to modeling currency returns. We decompose the currency returns into multiplicative sign and absolute return components, which exhibit much greater predictability...

This paper proposes a strategy to increase the efficiency of forecast combination. Given the availability of a wide range of forecasts for the same variable of interest, our goal is to apply combining methods to a restricted set of models. To this aim, a hierarchical procedure based on an...

The aim of this article is to examine how the dynamics of correlations between two emerging countries (Brazil and Mexico) and the US evolved from January 2003 to December 2013. The main contribution of this study is to explore whether the plunging stock market in the US, in the aftermath of...

This paper studies the existence of risk premia in crude oil futures prices with simple regression and Bayesian VAR models. It also studies the importance of three main risk premia models in explaining and forecasting the risk premia in practice. Whilst the existence of the premia and the...

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 has begun in July 2007 when a loss of confidence by investors in the value of securitized mortgages in the United States resulted in a liquidity crisis. World stock markets peaked in October 2007 and then entered a period of high volatility which culminated with...

The ex-ante forecast of the SP500 index discussed in Fantazzini (2010a), covering the time sample 14/04/2009-09/10/2010, and originally submitted to the Economics Bulletin on the 15/05/2009 is analyzed. It is found that the realized values of the SP500 index trailed the forecasted values quite...