We study the loss function of 15 European governments as implied by their budget balance forecasts. Results suggest that the shape of the loss function varies across countries. The loss function becomes more asymmetric as the forecast horizon increases and in advance of parliamentary election....

Forecast models with large cross-sections are often subject to overparameterization leading to unstable parameter estimates and hence inaccurate forecasts. Recent articles suggest that a large Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) with sufficient prior information dominates competing approaches....

The Covid-19 pandemic has spread across the world at a rate never seen before, affecting different countries and having a huge impact not only on health care systems but also on economic systems. Never as in this situation the continuous exchange of views between scientists of different...