This paper compares the forecasting ability of five alternative types of models in predicting four key macroeconomic variables, namely, per capita growth rate, the CPI inflation, the money market rate, and the growth rate of the nominal effective exchange rate for the South African economy....

This paper aims to introduce a nonlinear model to forecast macroeconomic time series using a large number of predictors. The technique used to summarize the predictors in a small number of variables is Principal Component Analysis (PC), while the method used to capture nonlinearity is artificial...

The estimation of large Vector Autoregressions with stochastic volatility using standard methods is computationally very demanding. In this paper we propose to model conditional volatilities as driven by a single common unobserved factor. This is justified by the observation that the pattern of...

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 a predictive regression framework to examine the out-of-sample predictability of South Africa’s equity premium, using a host of financial and macroeconomic variables. Past studies tend to suggest that the predictors on their own fail to deliver consistent out-of-sample forecast...

Recent research has shown that a reliable vector autoregressive model (VAR) for forecasting and structural analysis of macroeconomic data requires a large set of variables and modeling time variation in their volatilities. Yet, there are no papers jointly allowing for stochastic volatilities and...

This paper aims to introduce a nonlinear model to forecast macroeconomic time series using a large number of predictors. The technique used to summarize the predictors in a small number of variables is Principal Component Analysis (PC), while the method used to capture nonlinearity is artificial...

This paper studies U.S. inflation adjustment speed to aggregate technology shocks and to monetary policy shocks in a Bayesian VAR model with a large number of macroeconomic variables. According to the model estimated on the 1960-2007 sample, inflation adjusts much faster to aggregate technology...

Several sales models for a consumer’s goods manufacturer firm are developed and tested. A data panel approach is used to model aggregate sales across three countries, using mainly price and trade investment. We show how useful can be different panel data models to forecast sales across...

We study the performance of Bayesian model averaging as a forecasting method for a large panel of time series and compare its performance to principal components regression (PCR). We show empirically that these forecasts are highly correlated implying similar mean-square forecast errors. Applied...