The Federal Planning Bureau has been publishing medium-term macroeconomic projections for the Belgian economy since the beginning of the eighties. In this working paper past projection errors are scrutinised to give users a broad idea of the uncertainties surrounding these projections. The...

We propose a new family of density functions that possess both flexibility and closed form expressions for moments and anti-derivatives, making them particularly appealing for applications. We illustrate its usefulness by applying our new family to obtain density forecasts of U.S. inflation. Our...

This paper uses two-types of large-scale models, namely the Dynamic Factor Model (DFM) and Bayesian Vector Autoregressive (BVAR) Models based on alternative hyperparameters specifying the prior, which accommodates 267 macroeconomic time series, to forecast key macroeconomic variables of a small...

This paper uses Dynamic Factor Models (DFMs), estimated under both classical and Bayesian assumptions, which accommodates a large cross-section of macroeconomic time series for forecasting per capita growth rate, inflation, and the nominal short-term interest rate for the South African economy....

This paper uses the Dynamic Factor Model (DFM) framework, which accommodates a large cross-section of macroeconomic time series for forecasting regional house price inflation. As a case study, we use data on house price inflation for five metropolitan areas of South Africa. The DFM used in this...

This paper assesses the forecast performance of a set of VAR models under a growing number of restrictions. With a maximum forecast horizon of 12 years, we show that the farther the horizon is, the more structured and restricted VAR models have to be to produce accurate forecasts. Indeed,...

This paper describes the operating mode of the two existing Belgian fiscal councils as well as their role in the budgetary planning process. These institutions, created or reformed in depth in a context of large public deficits and increasing public debt-to-GDP ratios coupled with the...

It is not uncommon to observe the published forecasts of economic commentators closely bunched together over long periods of time. In our case, the phenomenon is observed for eight national panels of economists who report monthly forecasts. A framework is developed that conveniently nests within...

It is standard in applied work to select forecasting models by ranking candidate models by their prediction mean squared error (PMSE) in simulated out-of-sample (SOOS) forecasts. Alternatively, forecast models may be selected using information criteria (IC). We compare the asymptotic and...

ABSTRACT. We use a dynamic factor model proposed by Stock and Watson [1998, 1999,2002a,b] to forecast Colombian inflation. The model includes 92 monthly series observedover the period 1999:01-2008:06. The results show that for short-run horizons, factor modelforecasts significantly outperformed...