In this paper, we explore the potential gains from alternative combinations of the surveyed forecasts in the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters. Our analysis encompasses a variety of methods including statistical combinations based on principal components analysis and trimmed means,...

We apply a new methodology for identifying pervasive and discrete changes (``breaks'') in cross-sectional risk premia and find empirical evidence that these are economically important for understanding returns on US stocks. Size and value risk premia have fallen off to the point where they are...

We develop a new housing seach index (HSI) extracted from online search activity on a limited set of keywords related to the house buying process. We show that HSI has strong predictive power for subsequent changes in house prices, both in-sample and out-of-sample, and after controlling for the...

This paper implements strategies that use macroeconomic variables to select European equity mutual funds, including Pan-European, country, and sector funds. We find that several macro variables are useful in locating funds with future outperformance, and that country-specific mutual funds...

This paper adopts a new approach that accounts for breaks to the parameters of return prediction models both in the historical estimation period and at future points. Empirically, we find evidence of multiple breaks in return prediction models based on the dividend yield or a short interest...

Regime-switching models can match the tendency of financial markets to often change their behavior abruptly and the phenomenon that the new behavior of financial variables often persists for several periods after such a change. Although the regimes captured by regime-switching models are...

Research on forecasting methods has made important progress over recent years and these developments are brought together in the Handbook of Economic Forecasting. The handbook covers developments in how forecasts are constructed based on multivariate time-series models, dynamic factor models,...