We consider 1927 borrowers from 54 countries who had a credit rating by both Moody's and S&P at the end of 1998, and their subsequent default history up to the end of 2002. Viewing bond ratings as predicted probabilities of default, we consider partial orderings among competing probability...

We summarize the literature on the effectiveness of combining forecasts by assessing the conditions under which combining is most valuable. Using data on the six U.S. Presidential elections from 1992 through 2012, we then report the reduction in error obtained by averaging forecasts within and...

We demonstrate that the parameters controlling skewness and kurtosis in popular equity return models estimated at daily frequency can be obtained almost as precisely as if volatility is observable by simply incorporating the strong information content of realized volatility measures extracted...

We assess the forecast ability of Norges Bank's regional survey for inflation, GDP growth and the unemployment rate in Norway. We propose several factor models based on regional and sectoral information given by the survey. The analysis identifies which information extracted from the ten sectors...

We present an approach to forecast customer orders of ready-to-launch new products that are similar to past products. The approach fits product life cycle (PLC) curves to historical customer order data, clusters the curves of similar products, and uses the representative curve of the new...

Macroeconomic analysis in Lebanon presents a distinct challenge. For example, long delays in the publication of GDP data mean that our analysis often relies on proxy variables, and resembles an extended version of the 'nowcasting' challenge familiar to many central banks. Addressing this...

The use of "Big Data" to explain fluctuations in the broader economy or guide the business decisions of a firm is now so commonplace that in some instances it has even begun to rival more traditional government statistics and business analytics. Big data sources can very often provide advantages...

In the context of the Bank of Albania’s primary objective of achieving and maintaining price stability, generating accurate and reliable forecasts for the future rate of inflation is a necessity for its successful realization. This paper aims to enrich the Bank's portfolio of short-term...

In this paper we use bootstrap approach to test the null hypothesis thatall forecasters in the U.S. Surveys of Professional Forecasters (SPF) have equalability. Our bootstrap procedure captures any potential cross-sectional andserial correlation in the forecast errors while preserving the...

This paper considers bootstrap inference in model averaging for predictive regressions. We firstshow that a naïve bootstrap approach, which consists of stacking all residuals at time t into a vector, and then resampling these cross-sectional vectors of residuals over time is invalid in the...