The relevance of oil in the world economy explains why considerable effort has been devoted to the development of different types of econometric models for oil price forecasting. Several specifications have been proposed in the economic literature. Some are based on financial theory and...

This paper analyses the forecasting power of weekly futures prices at Nord Pool. The forecasting power of futures prices is compared to an ARIMAX model of the spot price. The time series model contains lagged external variables such as: temperature, precipitation, reservoir levels and the basis...

Ignoring for a moment the debate on whether balanced budget rules are a sensible idea from a macroeconomic point of view, there remains a major problem with tying one’s fi scal policy to econometric estimates of potential variables: their notorious unreliability. With every one of its biannual...

We propose a method to incorporate information from Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models into Dynamic Factor Analysis. The method combines a procedure previously applied for Bayesian Vector Autoregressions and a Gibbs Sampling approach for Dynamic Factor Models. The factors in...

The Paper analyses both the Conference Board as well as the OECD Leading Indicators concerning their forecasting properties of overall economic activity. For this purpose the two indicators are introduced separately and several in-sample and out-of-sample tests are being conducted. The main...

We analyze macroeconomic data using univariate and multivariate forecast combining techniques. We simulate forecast errors with different variance-covariance structures. The simulations are used to compare the performance of univariate and multivariate combining techniques.