Exchange-rate movement is regularly monitored by central banks for macroeconomic-analysis and market-surveillance purposes. Notwithstanding the pioneering study of Meese and Rogoff (1983), which shows the superiority of the random-walk model in out-of-sample exchange-rate forecast, there is some...

In this paper we examine which macroeconomic and financial variables have most predictive ability for the federal funds target rate decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). We conduct the analysis for the 157 FOMC decisions during the period January 1990–June 2008, using...

We propose a new approach to deal with structural breaks in time series models. The key contribution is an alternative dynamic stochastic specification for the model parameters which describes potential breaks. After a break new parameter values are generated from a so-called baseline prior...

In this paper we analyze the effect of four possible alternatives regarding the prior distributions in a linear model with autoregressive errors to predict piped water consumption: Normal-Gamma, Normal-Scaled Beta two, Studentized-Gamma and Student's t-Scaled Beta two. We show the effects of...

This paper shows entropic tilting to be a flexible and powerful tool for combining medium-term forecasts from BVARs with short-term forecasts from other sources (nowcasts from either surveys or other models). Tilting systematically improves the accuracy of both point and density forecasts, and...

This paper provides a simple epidemiology model where households, when forming their inflation expectations, rationally adopt the past release of inflation with certain probability rather than the forward-looking newspaper forecast as suggested in Carroll [2003, Macroeconomic Expectations of...

This paper examines which macroeconomic and financial variables are most informative for the federal funds target rate decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) from a forecasting perspective. The analysis is conducted for the FOMC decision during the period January 1990 - June...

Experts can rely on statistical model forecasts when creating their own forecasts. Usually it is not known what experts actually do. In this paper we focus on three questions, which we try to answer given the availability of expert forecasts and model forecasts. First, is the expert forecast...

We propose a new approach to deal with structural breaks in time series models. The key contribution is an alternative dynamic stochastic specification for the model parameters which describes potential breaks. After a break new parameter values are generated from a so-called baseline prior...

The Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) method can enhance Bayesian DSGE estimation by sampling from a posterior distribution spanning potentially nonnested models with parameter spaces of different dimensionality. We use the method to jointly sample from an ARMA process of unknown...