Evidence in favor of the monetary model of exchange rate determination for the South African Rand is, at best, mixed. A co-integrating relationship between the nominal exchange rate and monetary fundamentals forms the basis of the monetary model. With the econometric literature suggesting that...

This paper describes the set of Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) models that are being used at Banco de España to project GDP growth rates and to simulate macrofinancial risk scenarios for Brazil and Mexico. The toolkit consists of large benchmark models to produce baseline projections and...

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models have recently become standard tools for policy-oriented analyses. Nevertheless, their forecasting properties are still barely explored. We fill this gap by comparing the quality of real-time forecasts from a richly-specified DSGE model to those from...

We develop a technique to evaluate macroeconomic connectedness in any multi-country macroeconomic model with an approximate VAR representation. We apply our technique to a large Global VAR covering 25 countries and derive vivid representations of the connectedness of the system. We show that the...

The multivariate analysis of a panel of economic and financial time series with mixed frequencies is a challenging problem. The standard solution is to analyze the mix of monthly and quarterly time series jointly by means of a multivariate dynamic model with a monthly time index: artificial...

We introduce a new model for time-varying spatial dependence. The model extends the well-known static spatial lag model. All parameters can be estimated conveniently by maximum likelihood. We establish the theoretical properties of the model and show that the maximum likelihood estimator for the...

Many empirical studies have shown that factor models produce relatively accurate forecasts compared to alternative short-term forecasting models. These empirical findings have been established for different macroeconomic data sets and different forecast horizons. However, various specifications...

Dramatic changes in macroeconomic time series volatility pose a challenge to contemporary vector autoregressive (VAR) forecasting models. Traditionally, the conditional volatility of such models had been assumed constant over time or allowed for breaks across long time periods. More recent work,...

This paper describes the new forecasting tool used by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB) to derive near-term forecasts for GDP and imports for five Central, Eastern and Southeastern European (CESEE) countries, namely Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. An error...

We compare theoretical and empirical forecasts computed by rational agents living in a model economy to those produced by professional forecasters. We focus on the variance of the prediction errors as a function of the forecast horizon and analyze the speed with which it converges to a constant...