This paper focuses on survey expectations and discusses their uses for testing and modelling of expectations. Alternative models of expectations formation are reviewed and the importance of allowing for heterogeneity of expectations is emphasized. A weak form of the rational expectations...

The analysis of the financial cycle and its interaction with the macroeconomy has become a central issue for the design of macroprudential policy since the 2007-08 financial crisis. This paper proposes the construction of financial cycle measures for the US based on a large data set of...

The analysis of the financial cycle and its interaction with the macroeconomy has become a central issue for the design of macroprudential policy since the 2007-08 financial crisis. This paper proposes the construction of financial cycle measures for the US based on a large data set of...

Forecast combination has been proven to be a very important technique to obtain accurate predictions for various applications in economics, finance, marketing and many other areas. In many applications, forecast errors exhibit heavy-tailed behaviors for various reasons. Unfortunately, to our...

We summarize the literature on the effectiveness of combining forecasts by assessing the conditions under which combining is most valuable. Using data on the six U.S. Presidential elections from 1992 through 2012, we then report the reduction in error obtained by averaging forecasts within and...

In the context of the Bank of Albania’s primary objective of achieving and maintaining price stability, generating accurate and reliable forecasts for the future rate of inflation is a necessity for its successful realization. This paper aims to enrich the Bank's portfolio of short-term...

The weekly change of several German milkbased commodity prices do not only exhibit traditional patterns like mean dependence and volatility clustering, but also a high frequency of zero changes which can not be explained by well known ARIMA-GARCH models. Therefore, we develop a new mixture model...

We examine the forecasting performance of parametric and nonparametric models based on a training-validation sample approach and the use of rolling short-term forecasts to compute root mean-squared errors,We find that the performance of these models is better than that of the naıve, no-change...