We assess the spot price forecasting performance of 10 commodity futures at various horizons up to two years and test whether this performance is affected by market conditions. We reject efficient markets based on in-sample tests but, out-of-sample, we find that the forecast from the futures...

This study proposes a data-based algorithm to select a subset of indicators from a large data set with a focus on forecasting recessions. The algorithm selects leading indicators of recessions based on the forecast encompassing principle and combines the forecasts. An application to U.S. data...

Manufacturing in the Fifth District: assessing its role during the great recession by Robert H. Schnorbus (p. 48-51)

The economics profession in general, and economic forecasters in particular, have faced some understandable criticism for their failure to predict the timing and severity of the recent economic crisis. In this paper, we offer some assessment of the performance of the Economic Analysis conducted...

Joining the European Union big opportunities in the international markets have opened for Latvia. Paper purpose is to investigate influence of international integration processes on development of economy of Latvia. Latvia's incoming in EU increased the amount of received means from structural...

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Society of Business Economists Annual Conference, London, England, June 9, 2011

Commodity futures prices are frequently criticized as being uninformative for forecasting purposes because (1) they seem to do no better than a random walk or an extrapolation of recent trends and (2) futures prices for commodities often trace out a relatively flat trajectory even though global...

Remarks by President Dudley at the Quarterly Regional Economic Press Briefing, New York City.

This paper investigates whether oil prices have a reliable and stable out-of-sample relationship with the Canadian/U.S. dollar nominal exchange rate. Despite state-of-the-art methodologies, the authors find little systematic relation between oil prices and the exchange rate at the monthly and...

In this work we consider forecasting macroeconomic variables dur- ing an economic crisis. The focus is on a specific class of models, the so-called single hidden-layer feedforward autoregressive neural net- work models. What makes these models interesting in the present context is that they form...