Financial crises pose unique challenges for forecast accuracy. Using the IMF's Monitoring of Fund Arrangement (MONA) database, we conduct the most comprehensive evaluation of IMF forecasts to date for countries in times of crises. We examine 29 macroeconomic variables in terms of bias,...

This chapter demonstrates the usefulness of the GVAR modelling framework as a tool for scenario-based forecasting and counterfactual analysis. Working with the GVAR model developed by Greenwood-Nimmo, Nguyen and Shin (2010, J. Appl. Econometrics), we first show how probabilistic forecasting can...

This paper examines whether the predictability of securitized real estate returns differs from that of stock returns. It also provides a cross-country comparison of securitized real estate return predictability. In conrtast to most of the literature on this issue, the analysis is not based on a...

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...

The substantial variation in the real price of oil since 2003 has renewed interest in the question of how to forecast monthly and quarterly oil prices. There also has been increased interest in the link between financial markets and oil markets, including the question of whether financial market...

In this paper we want to discuss macroscopic and microscopic properties of financial markets. By analyzing quantitatively a database consisting of 13 minute per minute recorded financial time series, we identify some macroscopic statistical properties of the corresponding markets, with a special...

If oil exporters stabilize the purchasing power of their export revenues in terms of imports, exchange rate developments (and particularly, developments in the US dollar/euro exchange rate) may contain information about oil price changes. This hypothesis depends on three conditions: (a) OPEC has...

Models based on economic theory have serious problems at forecasting exchange rates better than simple univariate driftless random walk models, especially at short horizons. Multivariate time series models suffer from the same problem. In this paper, we propose to forecast exchange rates with a...