In this paper we study what professional forecasters actually explain. We use spectral analysis and state space modeling to decompose economic time series into a trend, a business-cycle, and an irregular component. To examine which components are captured by professional forecasters we regress...

Random subspace methods are a novel approach to obtain accurate forecasts in high-dimensional regression settings. We provide a theoretical justification of the use of random subspace methods and show their usefulness when forecasting monthly macroeconomic variables. We focus on two approaches....

We propose a Bayesian infinite hidden Markov model to estimate time-varying parameters in a vector autoregressive model. The Markov structure allows for heterogeneity over time while accounting for state-persistence. By modelling the transition distribution as a Dirichlet process mixture model,...

In modern data sets, the number of available variables can greatly exceed the number of observations. In this paper we show how valid confidence intervals can be constructed by approximating the inverse covariance matrix by a scaled Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse, and using the lasso to perform a...

Multiple unordered treatments with a binary instrument for each treatment are common in policy evaluation. This multiple treatment setting allows for different types of changes in treatment status that are non-compliant with the activated instrument. Therefore, instrumental variable (IV) methods...

In this paper we study what professional forecasters actually explain. We use spectral analysis and state space modeling to decompose economic time series into a trend, a business-cycle, and an irregular component. To examine which components are captured by professional forecasters we regress...

Random subspace methods are a novel approach to obtain accurate forecasts in high-dimensional regression settings. We provide a theoretical justification of the use of random subspace methods and show their usefulness when forecasting monthly macroeconomic variables. We focus on two approaches....