An essential element of the work of the Fund is to monitor and forecast international trade. This paper uses SWIFT messages on letters of credit, together with crude oil prices and new export orders of manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI), to improve the short-term forecast of...

The prevalence of energy poverty as a major challenge in numerous countries, the escalating energy crisis that generates supply fears and increased prices, and the need to build just supporting mechanisms within the net zero energy transition add impetus to improving our ability to accurately...

In this work, we apply cutting edge machine learning algorithms to one of the oldest challenges in finance: Predicting returns. For the sake of simplicity, we focus on predicting the direction (e.g. either up or down) of several liquid ETFs and do not attempt to predict the magnitude of price...

The shipping industry has been quite successful in reducing the number of major accidents in the past. In order to continue this development in the future, innovative leading risk indicators can make a significant contribution. If designed properly, they enable a forward-looking identification...

We establish the out-of-sample predictability of monthly exchange rate changes via machine learning techniques based on 70 predictors capturing country characteristics, global variables, and their interactions. To guard against overfitting, we use the elastic net to estimate a high-dimensional...

The international tourist movement has overgrown in recent decades, and travelers are considered a significant source of income to the tourism economy. When tourists visit a place, they spend considerable money on their enjoyment, travel, and hotel accommodations. In this research, tourist data...