In this paper, we provide new evidence on the empirical usefulness of various simple seasonal models, and underscore the importance of carefully designing criteria by which one judges alternative models. In particular, we underscore the importance of both choice of forecast or simulation horizon...

This paper provides a comprehensive framework for comparing predictors of univariate time series in the mean square norm. Initially, the forecast errors are assumed to be unbiased, independent, and normally distributed. Each of these is progressively relaxed. A new heteroscedasticity and...

The year 2008 started in January (Jan 23, 2008) with ambitious European initiatives on climate change when the European Commission suggested a climate packages with new targets for energy from renewable sources (RES), for the design of the third phase of the emission trading system, for a...

This study analyzes the performance of the IMF World Economic Outlook forecasts for world output and the aggregates of both the advanced economies and the emerging and developing economies. With a focus on the forecast for the current and the next year, we examine whether IMF forecasts can be...

In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to forecast gross value-added (GVA) and its sectoral subcomponents at the regional level. With an autoregressive distributed lagmodel we forecast total and sectoral GVA for one German state (Saxony) with more than 300 indicators from different...

Recent articles suggest that a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) with shrinkage is a good forecast device even when the number of variables is large. In this paper we evaluate different variants of the BVAR with respect to their forecast accuracy for euro area real GDP growth and HICP...

The aim of this article is to examine how the dynamics of correlations between two emerging countries (Brazil and Mexico) and the US evolved from January 2003 to December 2013. The main contribution of this study is to explore whether the plunging stock market in the US, in the aftermath of...

We use a machine-learning approach known as Boosted Regression Trees (BRT) to reexamine the usefulness of selected leading indicators for predicting recessions. We estimate the BRT approach on German data and study the relative importance of the indicators and their marginal effects on the...

Since the influential paper of Stock and Watson (2002), the dynamic factor model (DFM) has been widely used for forecasting macroeconomic key variables such as GDP. However, the DFM has some weaknesses. For nowcasting, the dynamic factor model is modified by using the mixed data sampling...

In this paper we analyze the determinants of export sophistication based on a large panel dataset (2001-2014; 101 countries) and using different estimation algorithms. Using Monte Carlo simulations we evaluate the bias properties of estimators and show that GMM-type estimators outperform...