The paper analyses reasons for departures from strong rationality of growth and inflation forecasts based on annual observations from 1963 to 2004. We rely on forecasts from the joint forecast of the so-called "six leading" forecasting institutions in Germany and argue that violations of the...

There are many types of econometric models used in predicting the inflation rate, but in this study we used a Bayesian shrinkage combination approach. This methodology is used in order to improve the predictions accuracy by including information that is not captured by the econometric models....

We evaluate residual projection strategies in the context of a large-scale macro model of the euro area and smaller benchmark time-series models. The exercises attempt to measure the accuracy of model-based forecasts simulated both out-of-sample and in-sample. Both exercises incorporate...

Since the adoption of inflation targeting, the seasonal appears to be the component that explains the major part of inflation’s total variation in Mexico. In this context, we study the performance of seasonal time series models to forecast short-run inflation. Using multi-horizon evaluation...

This paper discusses how the forecast accuracy of a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) is affected by introducing the zero lower bound on the federal funds rate. As a benchmark I adopt a common BVAR specification, including 18 variables, estimated shrinkage, and no nonlinearity. Then I...

The primary goal of this paper is to describe several models that are currently used at the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia (NBRM) for short-term forecasting of inflation - Autoregressive integrated moving average models (aggregated and disaggregated approach), three equation...

Bayesian predictive synthesis is a flexible method of combining density predictions. The flexibility comes from the ability to choose an arbitrary synthesis function to combine predictions. I study the choice of synthesis function when combining large numbers of predictions-a common occurrence...

This paper addresses the relative importance of monetary indicators for forecasting inflation in the euro area in a Bayesian framework. Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA)based on predictive likelihoods provides a framework that allows for the estimation of inclusion probabilities of a particular...

In this paper we show that the exchange rates of some commodity exporter countries have the ability to predict the price of spot and future contracts of aluminum. This is shown with both insample and out-of-sample analyses. The theoretical underpinning of these results relies on the...

This paper introduces a new test of the predictive performance and market timing for categorical forecasts based on contingency tables when the user has non-categorical loss functions. For example, a user might be interested in the return of an underlying variable instead of just the direction....