Historically, rapid and unsustainable increases in the demand for goods and services originating within the economies of Canada's major trading partners have had a significant impact on the domestic economy. These episodes are typically characterized by increases in world commodity prices and by...

In this paper we investigate whether considering the fine structure of half-hourly electricity prices, the market closing prices of fundamentals (natural gas, coal and CO2) and the system-wide demand can lead to significantly more accurate short- and mid-term forecasts of APX UK baseload prices....

We use a Panel Smooth Transition Regression (STR) model to study nonlinearities in the expectation-formation process in the U.S. stock market. To this end, we use data from the Livingston survey to investigate how the importance of regressive and extrapolative expectations fluctuates over time...

A long strand of literature has shown that the world has become more global. Yet, the recent Great Global Recession turned out to be hard to predict, with forecasters across the world committing large forecast errors. We examine whether knowledge of in-sample co-movement across countries could...

Recently, Nowotarski et al. (2013) have found that wavelet-based models for the long-term seasonal component (LTSC) are not only better in extracting the LTSC from a series of spot electricity prices but also significantly more accurate in terms of forecasting these prices up to a year ahead...

In this paper, we forecast excess stock returns of S&P 500 index from January 1997 to December 2012 using both well-known traditional macroeconomic indicators and oil market variables. Based on a dynamic model selection approach, we find that the forecasting accuracy can be improved after adding...

In this paper, we discuss the structure of a forward-looking model of the Japanese economy, which has been jointly developed by the Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University, and the Policy Research Institute, Ministry of Finance, and use the model to simulate policies for fiscal...

In the wake of the recent international economic recession in 2008-2009, forecasting methods designed to anticipate business cycles have been widely revisited. Recent innovative econometric methods were presented and widely discussed by academics and economists from international and national...

In an inflation targeting regime, the best possible knowledge of demand-side inflationary pressure is of priority importance for monetary policy. In applied macroeconomic models, this is traditionally represented by the actual position of the cyclical component of GDP (the output gap). This...

Economic policies are generally formulated on the basis of data available in real time, which might subsequently be revised. Implicitly, the possibility of data revisions creates an element of uncertainty around the very same data driving policy decisions. Given that such uncertainty could be...