Public investment in advanced economies is at historical lows, and shows a declining trend since at least the 1980s. Two main hypotheses have been posed to rationalize this fact. On the one hand, the “social dominance hypothesis” claims that this is related to structural factors, given the...

This paper analyzes the accuracy of budget forecasts in Turkey. Data is based on 23 years' forecasted and materialized general budget revenues and outlays, from 1981 to 2003. One sample statistics, tabulated, and one sample t tests are applied to find out the accuracy of forecasting and the...

So far, there are very few papers concerning the problems of non causality and non-fundamentalness in fiscal studies. This is even truer for Brazil. Non causality and non fundamentalness are econometric problems that are specially relevant in fiscal studies, as they are relate to fiscal...

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...

Cross institutional forecast evaluations may be severely distorted by the fact that forecasts are made at different points in time, and thus with different amount of information. This paper proposes a method to account for these differences. The method computes the timing effect and the...

No macroeconometeric forecasting technique anticipated the financial market meltdown and subsequent Great Recession in 2008-2009. This failure is not surprising because it is hard to forecast unprecedented events. The experience explains, however, why many forecasters, particular those supplying...

Reliable and timely information about current economic conditions is crucial for policy makers and expectations formation. This paper demonstrates the efficacy of the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and the Purchasing Manager Indices (PMI) in anticipating US real economic activity. We...

In this paper we propose to exploit the heterogeneity of forecasts produced by different model specifications to measure forecast uncertainty. Our approach is simple and intuitive.It consists in selecting all the models that outperform some benchmark model, and then to construct an empirical...

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...