This paper analyses the statistical properties of annual inflation forecasts prepared by the EBRD for 25 transition countries between 1994 and 2005. The empirical results show that EBRD forecasts are mostly unbiased. Late within-year forecasts are also found to be efficient. Forecast accuracy is...

Recent empirical literature shows that key macro variables such as GDP and productivity display long memory dynamics. For DSGE models, we propose a �Generalized� Kalman Filter to deal effectively with this problem: our method connects to and innovates upon data-filtering techniques...

This paper examines the role of currency and banking in the German financial crisis of 1931 for both Germany and the U.S. We specify a structural dynamic factor model to identify financial and monetary factors separately for each of the two economies. We find that monetary transmission through...

This paper explores the link between the leverage of the US financial sector, of households and of non-financial businesses, and real activity. We document that leverage is negatively correlated with the future growth of real activity, and positively linked to the conditional volatility of...

A procedure that has been used at the Swiss National Bank for selecting vector-autoregressive (VAR) models in order to forecast Swiss consumer price inflation is presented. In order to examine and improve the quality of the procedure, it is submitted to several modifications and the results are...

We evaluate different approaches for using monthly indicators to predict Chinese GDP for the current and the next quarter (‘nowcasts’ and ‘forecasts’, respectively). We use three types of mixed-frequency models, one based on an economic activity indicator (Liu et al., 2007), one based on...

This paper builds on a simple unified representation of shrinkage Bayes estimators based on hierarchical Normal-Gamma priors. Various popular penalized least squares estimators for shrinkage and selection in regression models can be recovered using this single hierarchical Bayes formulation....

In this paper, we compare the forecasting performance of univariate noncausal and conventional causal autoregressive models for a comprehensive data set consisting of 170 monthly U.S. macroeconomic and financial time series. The noncausal models consistently outperform the causal models in terms...

Macroeconomic forecasts are often based on the interaction between econometric models and experts. A forecast that is based only on an econometric model is replicable and may be unbiased, whereas a forecast that is not based only on an econometric model, but also incorporates expert intuition,...

Macroeconomic forecasts are frequently produced, widely published, intensively discussed and comprehensively used. The formal evaluation of such forecasts has a long research history. Recently, a new angle to the evaluation of forecasts has been addressed, and in this review we analyse some...