Forecasts guide decisions in all areas of economics and finance and their value can only be understood in relation to, and in the context of, such decisions. We discuss the central role of the loss function in helping determine the forecaster's objectives and use this to present a unified...

Simulation evidence obtained within a Bayesian model of price-setting in a betting market, where anonymous gamblers queue to bet against a risk-neutral bookmaker, suggests that a gambler who wants to maximize future profits should trade on the advice of the analyst cum probability forecaster who...

Recent empirical work documents substantial disagreement in inflation expectations obtained from survey data. Furthermore, the extent of such disagreement varies systematically over time in a way that reflects the level and variance of current inflation. This paper offers a simple explanation...

This paper evaluates the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of eleven models for monthly volatility in fifteen stock markets. Volatility is defined as within-month standard deviation of continuously compounded daily returns on the stock market index of each country for the ten-year period 1988...

This paper examines the daily volatility of changes in the 10-year Treasury note utilizing the iterated cumulative sums of squares algorithm [C. Inclan, G. Tiao, Use of cumulative sums of squares for retrospective detection of changes of variance, J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 89 (1994) 913–923]. The...

This paper estimates a switching autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic time series model for returns on the daily German stock market index. Volatility clustering is captured by persistent periods of different volatility levels and by the dependence on past innovations. We introduce a...

Forecasts are only as good as the data behind them. But macroeconomic data are revised, often significantly, as time passes and new source data become available and conceptual changes are made. How is forecasting influenced by the fact that data are revised? To answer this question, we begin...

This study examines the contribution of several survey indicators published by the European Commission to forecasting overall economic activity in the euro area. It entails a quantitative evaluation of the information content of seven composite indicators with regard to GDP growth. A preliminary...