Many postulated relations in finance imply that expected asset returns strictly increase in an underlying characteristic. To examine the validity of such a claim, one needs to take the entire range of the characteristic into account, as is done in the recent proposal of Patton and Timmermann...

We present a medium-scale dynamic factor model to estimate and forecast the rate of growth of the Spanish economy in the very short term. The intermediate size of the model overcomes the serious specification problems associated with large scale-models and the implicit loss of information of...

In this paper we extend the Stock and Watson's (Leading economic indicators, new approaches and forecasting records, 1991) single-index dynamic factor model in an econometric framework that has the advantage of combining information from real and financial indicators published at different...

Over the past 10 years dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have become an important tool in quantitative macroeconomics. However, DSGE models were not considered as a forecasting tool until very recently. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we compare the forecasting...

Inference on the long-run properties of a Vector Autoregression (VAR) consisting wholly of I(1) variables are made using Bayesian methods. In particular, the implications on the forecast and impulse response function distributions of directly estimating and restricting the drift parameters of...

We assess whether the voting records of central bank boards are informative about future monetary policy using data on five inflation targeting countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom). We find that in all countries the voting records, namely the difference...

This paper applies the Model Confidence Set (MCS) procedure of Hansen, Lunde, and Nason (2003) to a set of volatility models. A MCS is analogous to confidence interval of a parameter in the sense that the former contains the best forecasting model with a certain probability. The key to the MCS...

This paper investigates the role of published stock recommendations in print and online media as investor sentiment in the near-term German stock market. In line with extant literature on other sentiment measures, vector autoregressions reveal that past stock returns drive today's sentiment, but...

Recently, there has been increased interest in real-time forecasts of the real price of crude oil. Standard oil price forecasts based on reduced-form regressions or based on oil futures prices do not allow consumers of forecasts to explore how much the forecast would change relative to the...

Forecasting real economic activity poses a considerable challenge not only due to hard-to-predict events like the current financial crisis but also due to the fact that targeted variables often undergo significant revisions after their first publication. In this paper we report the results of a...