Many macroeconomic forecasts and forecast updates like those from IMF and OECD typically involve both a model component, which is replicable, as well as intuition, which is non-replicable. Intuition is expert knowledge possessed by a forecaster. If forecast updates are progressive, forecast...

Central banks, private banks, statistical agencies and international organizations such as the IMF and OECD typically use information about the exchange rate some weeks before the publication date as the basis for their exchange rate forecasts. In this paper, we test if forecasts can be made...

We propose a novel framework to gauge the credibility of central banks' commitment to an inflation-targeting regime. Our framework combines survey data on macroeconomic forecasts with high-frequency financial market data to understand how inflation targeting makes economic agents change their...

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...

It has increasingly become standard practice to supplement point macroeconomic forecasts with an appraisal of the degree of uncertainty and the prevailing direction of risks. Several alternative approaches have been proposed in the literature to compute the probability distribution of...

Government agencies and other national and international institutions are asked to perform forecasts over the medium term. In particular, the EU Stability and Growth Pact contains the obligation to formulate stability programmes over four years, covering a general economic outlook as well as the...