In recent years, survey-based measures of expectations and disagreement have received increasing attention in economic research. Many forecast surveys ask their participants for fixed-event forecasts. Since fixed-event forecasts have seasonal properties, researchers often use an ad-hoc approach...

This paper applies component-wise boosting to the topic of regional economic forecasting. Component-wise boosting is a pre-selection algorithm of indicators for forecasting. By using unique quarterly real gross domestic product data for two German states (the Free State of Saxony and...

In this paper we investigate the forecasting performance of the median Consumer Price Index (CPI) in a variety of Bayesian vector autoregressions (BVARs) that are often used for monetary policy. Until now, the use of trimmed-mean price statistics in forecasting inflation has often been relegated...

Over the last decade, the topic of regional economic forecasting has become increasingly prevalent in academic literature. The most striking problem in this context is data availability at a regional level. However, considerable methodological improvements have been made to address this problem....

In periods of unusual weather, forecasters face a problem of interpreting economic data: Which part goes back to the underlying economic trend and which part arises from a special weather effect? In this paper, we discuss ways to disentangle weather-related from business cycle-related influences...

This paper documents multivariate forecast disagreement among professional forecasters of the Euro area economy and discusses implications for models of heterogeneous expectation formation. Disagreement varies over time and is strongly counter-cyclical. Disagreement is positively correlated with...

A couple of recent papers have shifted the focus towards disagreement of professional forecasters. When dealing with survey data that is sampled at a frequency higher than annual and that includes only fixed event forecasts, e.g. expectation of average annual growth rates measures of...

We analyze how modeling international dependencies improves forecasts for the global economy based on a Bayesian GVAR with SSVS prior and stochastic volatility. To analyze the source of performance gains, we decompose the predictive joint density into its marginals and a copula term capturing...

We present evidence that global vectorautoregressive (GVAR) models produce significantly more accurate recession forecasts than country-specific time-series models in a Bayesian framework. This result holds for most countries and forecast horizons as well as for several country groups.

We investigate the information content of business tendency surveys for key macroeconomic variables in Switzerland. To summarise the information of a large data set of sectoral business tendency surveys we extract a small number of common factors by a principal components estimator. The...