We explore convenient analytic properties of distributions constructed as mixtures of scaled and shifted t-distributions. A feature that makes this family particularly desirable for econometric applications is that it possesses closed-form expressions for its anti-derivatives (e.g., the...

In this paper, nonlinear models are restricted to mean nonlinear parametric models. Several such models popular in time series econometrics are presented and some of their properties discussed. This includes two models based on universal approximators: the Kolmogorov-Gabor polynomial model and...

Professional forecasters can rely on an econometric model to create their forecasts. It is usually unknown to what extent they adjust an econometric model-based forecast. In this paper we show, while making just two simple assumptions, that it is possible to estimate the persistence and variance...

The level of revenues pocketed by a government during the fiscal year often deviates from that projected by this government in its budget. Despite a flourishing literature on, for example, the technical or procedural determinants of such forecast errors, little is yet known about how political...

The level of revenues pocketed by a government during the fiscal year often deviates from that projected by this government in its budget. Despite a flourishing literature on, for example, the technical or procedural determinants of such forecast errors, little is yet known about how political...

The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...

In any dataset with individual forecasts of economic variables, some forecasters will perform better than others. However, it is possible that these ex post differences reflect sampling variation and thus overstate the ex ante differences between forecasters. In this paper, we present a simple...

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the U.S. Federal Reserve publishes the range of members' forecasts for key macroeconomic variables, but not the distribution of forecasts within this range. To evaluate these projections, previous papers compare the midpoint of the ranges with the...

Recent theoretical advances in consumption theory suggest that there may exist predictable consumption surges which, if not taken sufficiently into account in forecasting, may lead to predictable forecast errors. We use this insight to identify economic variables that might help improve the...

National accounts data are always revised. Not only recent data, but also figures dating many years back can be revised substantially. This means that there is a danger that an important part of the central bank's information set is flawed for a long period of time. In this paper we present a...