This paper discusses methods to quantify risk and uncertainty in macroeconomic forecasts. Both, parametric and non-parametric procedures are developed. The former are based on a class of asymmetrically weighted normal distributions whereas the latter employ asymmetric bootstrap simulations. Both...

This paper compares different ways to estimate the current state of the economy using factor models that can handle unbalanced datasets. Due to the different release lags of business cycle indicators, data unbalancedness often emerges at the end of multivariate samples, which is sometimes...

In this paper, we put DSGE forecasts in competition with factor forecasts. We focus on these two models since they represent nicely the two opposing forecasting philosophies. The DSGE model on the one hand has a strong theoretical economic background; the factor model on the other hand is mainly...

Macroeconomic risk assessments play an important role in the forecasts of many institutions. However, to the best of our knowledge their performance has not been investigated yet. In this work, we study the Bank of England?s risk forecasts for inflation. We find that these forecasts do not...

We compared forecasts of stock market volatility based on real-time and revised macroeconomic data. To this end, we used a new dataset on monthly real-time macroeconomic variables for Germany. The dataset covers the period 1994-2005. We used a statistical, a utility-based, and an options-based...

Efficiency is considered a key factor when evaluating a bank's performance. Moreover, efficiency enhancement is an explicit policy objective in the Single Market Directive of the European Commission. But efficiency improvements may come at the expense of deteriorating bank profits and excessive...

In this study we forecast the term structure of FIBOR/EURIBOR swap rates by means of recursive vector autoregressive (VAR) models. In advance, a principal components analysis (PCA) is adopted to reduce the dimensionality of the term structure. To evaluate ex?ante forecasting performance for...

We consider the problem of ex-ante forecasting conditional correlation patterns using ultra high frequency data. Flexible semiparametric predictors referring to the class of dynamic panel and dynamic factor models are adopted for daily forecasts. The parsimonious set up of our approach allows to...

We estimate the political economy determinants of budget deficit forecast errors. Since the adoption of the Stability Pact, Eurozone governments have manipulated forecasts before elections. The political orientation and the institutional design of governments also affects the quality of forecasts.

The study at hand deals with the expectations of professional analysts and novices in the context of foreign exchange markets. We analyze the respective forecasting accuracy and our results indicate that there exist substantial differences between professional forecasts and judgmental forecasts...