Many clients rely heavily on pretender price forecasts, provided by the Quantity Surveyor (QS), for their investment decisions. During the preliminary design stage, it is very common in practice for Q.S. to use historical building price data on which to base the forecast of the target project ?...

Building client/owners need estimates of likely construction costs for budgeting purposes early in the procurement process when little detailed design information is available beyond the type, size and location of the facility. One of the more sophisticated techniques available for this purpose...

This study evaluates the forecasting accuracy of five alternative econometric models in the context of predicting the quarterly international tourism demand in 25 countries or country groupings. Tourism demand is measured in terms of tourist expenditure by inbound international visitors in a...

This statistical study refines and updates Sharpe's empirical paper (1975, Financial Analysts Journal) on switching between US common stocks and cash equivalents. According to the original conclusion, profitable market timing relies on a representative portfolio manager who can correctly...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of VAR and ARIMA models to forecast Austrian HICP inflation. Additionally, we investigate whether disaggregate modelling of five subcomponents of inflation is superior to specifications of headline HICP inflation. Our modelling procedure...

We investigate whether the favorable performance of a fairly simple multistate multivariate Markov regime switching model relative to even very complex multivariate GARCH specifications, recently reported in the literature using measures of in-sample prediction accuracy, extends to pseudo...

Forecasting the inflation path is an important task for central banks in an inflation targeting regime. Therefore, central banks must continuously evaluate the forecasting accuracy of the models used to generate inflation forecasts. This paper evaluates the performance of most of the models that...

Norges Bank has since 1989 been using a risk index for banks. The purpose of this risk index is to identify potential problem banks, and to obtain a general picture of the health of the banking industry. In 1994 the risk index was reconstructed based on research by Sigbjørn Atle Berg and Barbro...