Central to the conduct of monetary policy are inflation forecasts. Inflation forecast are not unique. Central banks and professional organizations generate inflation forecasts while households are surveyed about their inflation outlook. This paper estimates inflation forecast disagreement for...

This paper places the data revision model of Jacobs and van Norden (2011) within a class of trend-cycle decompositions relating directly to the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition. In both these approaches identifying restrictions on the covariance matrix under simple and realistic conditions may...

International pressure to revalue China's currency stems in part from the expectation that rapid economic growth should be associated with a real exchange rate appreciation. This hinges on the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis under which economic growth, stemming from improvements in traded sector...

This paper introduces the concept of a Forecast Combination Equilibrium to model boundedly rational agents who combine a menu of different forecasts using insights from the forecasting literature to mimic the behavior of actual forecasters. The equilibrium concept is consistent with rational...

We apply the novel approach of Siliverstovs (2015) to modelling data sampled at different frequencies in order to scrutinise the composition of one of the most influential economic indicators in Switzerland. The Purchasing Managers' Index consists of eight sub-indices out of which only five...

This paper uses the Markov-switching multifractal (MSM) model and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH)-type models to forecast oil price volatility over the time periods from January 02, 1875 to December 31, 1895 and from January 03, 1977 to March 24, 2014. Based on...

This paper generalizes the popular stochastic volatility in mean model of Koopman and Hol Uspensky (2002) to allow for time-varying parameters in the conditional mean. The estimation of this extension is nontrival since the volatility appears in both the conditional mean and the conditional...

The federal government announced in its 2012 budget its intention to delay the age of eligibility for Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement from 65 to 67 years. By the time the policy is fully implemented (i.e., in 2030), this delay will have increased net revenues of the federal...

We study the impact of diverse beliefs on conduct of monetary policy. We use a New Keynesian Model solved with a quadratic approximation. Aggregation renders the belief distribution an aggregate state variable. Diverse expectations change standard results about a smooth trade-off between...

In this paper, we compare the out-of-sample forecasting ability of three ARIMA family models: ARIMA, ARIMAX, and ARIMAX-GARCH. The models are tested to forecast turning points and trends in the Canadian real estate index using monthly data from April 2002 to March 2011. The results indicate that...