Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

Inflation forecasts are a key ingredient for monetary policy-making -- especially in an inflation targeting country such as South Africa. Generally, a typical Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) only includes a core set of variables. As such, other variables, e.g. such as alternative...

The number of short-time workers from January to April 2020 is used to now- and forecast quarterly GDP growth. We purge the monthly log level series from the systematic component to extract unexpected changes or shocks to log short-time workers. These monthly shocks are included in a univariate...

The number of employees historically filed and registered from January to April 2020 for short-time compensation is used to obtain a nowcast for GDP growth in the first quarter and an outlook until the third quarter 2021. We purge the monthly log level series from the systematic component to...

This paper develops and illustrates a simple method to generate a DSGE model-based forecast for variables that do not explicitly appear in the model (non-core variables). We use auxiliary regressions that resemble measurement equations in a dynamic factor model to link the non-core variables to...

This paper advances the application of Bayesian graphical structural vector autoregressive (BGSVAR) models to address the problem of impulse response estimation in VAR-based systems. The BGSVAR is designed as a robust empirical framework for impulse response estimation using information from the...

Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

The identification of real estate cycles has always been an important issue in the study of real estate. This paper selected as indicators the Composite Leading Index and Reference Cycle Index regarding the real estate cycles in Taiwan, as they incorporate real estate activities, such as...

This paper examines the business cycle linkages that propagate industry-specific business cycle shocks throughout the economy in a way that (sometimes) generates aggregated cycles. The transmission of sectoral business cycles is modelled through a multivariate Markov-switching model, which is...

We examine the short-term performance of two alternative approaches to forecasting using dynamic factor models. The first approach extracts the seasonal component of the individual indicators before estimating the dynamic factor model, while the alternative uses the non-seasonally adjusted data...