Prediction markets – markets used to forecast future events – have been used to accurately forecast the outcome of political contests, sporting events, and, occasionally, economic outcomes. This chapter summarizes the latest research on prediction markets in order to further their...

This chapter surveys the methods available for extracting information from option prices that can be used in forecasting. We consider option-implied volatilities, skewness, kurtosis, and densities. More generally, we discuss how any forecasting object that is a twice differentiable function of...

This chapter reviews the evidence of predictability in U.S. residential and commercial real estate markets. First, we highlight the main methodologies used in the construction of real estate indices, their underlying assumptions and their impact on the stochastic properties of the resultant...

We address some of the key questions that arise in forecasting the price of crude oil. What do applied forecasters need to know about the choice of sample period and about the tradeoffs between alternative oil price series and model specifications? Are real and nominal oil prices predictable...

This chapter discusses what the asset-pricing literature concludes about the forecastability of interest rates. It outlines forecasting methodologies implied by this literature, including dynamic, no-arbitrage term structure models and their macro-finance extensions. It also reviews the...

We survey the literature on stock return forecasting, highlighting the challenges faced by forecasters as well as strategies for improving return forecasts. We focus on U.S. equity premium forecastability and illustrate key issues via an empirical application based on updated data. Some studies...

Policymakers use forecasts to project the consequences of particular policy decisions for certain policy targets. This chapter investigates the use of economic forecasting in policy making by discussing practical examples, providing new empirical evidence and computing forecasts using different...