Mixed frequency Bayesian vector autoregressions (MF-BVARs) allow forecasters to incorporate a large number of mixed frequency indicators into forecasts of economic activity. This paper evaluates the forecast performance of MF-BVARs relative to surveys of professional forecasters and investigates...

I study the performance of single predictor bridge equation models as well as a wide range of model selection and pooling techniques, including Mallows model averaging and Cross-Validation model averaging, for short-term forecasting euro area GDP growth. I explore to what extend model selection...

In periods of unusual weather, forecasters face a problem of interpreting economic data: Which part goes back to the underlying economic trend and which part arises from a special weather effect? In this paper, we discuss ways to disentangle weather-related from business cycle-related influences...

The paper analyses reasons for departures from strong rationality of growth and inflation forecasts based on annual observations from 1963 to 2004. We rely on forecasts from the joint forecast of the so-called "six leading" forecasting institutions in Germany and argue that violations of the...

In this paper we extend the targeted-regressor approach suggested in Bai and Ng (2008) for variables sampled at the same frequency to mixed-frequency data. Our MIDASSO approach is a combination of the unrestricted MIxed-frequency DAta-Sampling approach (U-MIDAS) (see Foroni et al., 2015; Castle et...

We investigate the information content of business tendency surveys for key macroeconomic variables in Switzerland. To summarise the information of a large data set of sectoral business tendency surveys we extract a small number of common factors by a principal components estimator. The...