The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...

This study investigates usefulness of business tendency surveys in industrial sector for out-of-sample prediction of growth of industrial production in Russia. A special attention is paid to performance of survey-augmented models during the recent Great Recession 2008/2009. Using the real-time...

The debate on the forecasting ability in economics of non-linear models has a long history, and the Great Recession provides us with an opportunity for a re-assessment of the forecasting performance of several classes of non-linear models, widely used in applied macroeconomic research. In this...

Forecasting the world economy is a difficult task given the complex interrelationships within and across countries. This paper proposes a number of approaches to forecast short-term changes in selected world economic variables and aims, first, at ranking various forecasting methods in terms of...

Despite the enormous reach and influence of the literature on economic and economic policy uncertainty, one surprisingly under-researched topic has been the forecasting performance of economic uncertainty measures. We evaluate the ability of seven popular measures of uncertainty to forecast...

We utilize mixed frequency factor-MIDAS models for the purpose of carrying out pastcasting, nowcasting, and forecasting experiments using real-time data. We also introduce a new real-time Korean GDP dataset, which is the focus of our experiments. The methodology that we utilize involves first...

Financial data often contain information that is helpful for macroeconomic forecasting, while multistep forecast accuracy also benefits by incorporating good nowcasts of macroeconomic variables. This paper considers the role of nowcasts of financial variables in making conditional forecasts of...

We assess point and density forecasts from a mixed-frequency vector autoregression (VAR) to obtain intra-quarter forecasts of output growth as new information becomes available. The econometric model is specified at the lowest sampling frequency; high frequency observations are treated as...

We develop a small-scale dynamic factor model for the Swiss economy allowing for non-linearities by means of a two-state Markov-chain. The selection of an appropriate set of indicators utilizes a combinatorial algorithm. The model's forecasting performance is as good as that of peers with richer...

Summarizing Hendry's forty years of work on taming uncertainty is "clear and distinct": Test, test, test. Sure - but test what? Test the maintained assumptions of the disturbances. Test the parameter restrictions of a given model. Test the explanatory power of a model against a rival model. In...