This paper investigates the performance of early warning systems in real-time, using forecasts of indicators that were available at the moment predictions are to be made. The study analyzes currency crises in eight Latin American and Central and Eastern European countries, distinguishing an...

We develop a small-scale dynamic factor model for the Swiss economy based on an appropriately selected set of indicators. The resulting business cycle factor is in striking accordance with historical Swiss business cycle fluctuations. Our proposed model demonstrates a remarkable performance in...

Although there is much interest in the future retail price of gasoline among consumers, industry analysts, and policymakers, it is widely believed that changes in the price of gasoline are essentially unforecastable given publicly available information. We explore several new forecasting...

Mixed frequency Bayesian vector autoregressions (MF-BVARs) allow forecasters to incorporate a large number of mixed frequency indicators into forecasts of economic activity. This paper evaluates the forecast performance of MF-BVARs relative to surveys of professional forecasters and investigates...

We assess the effectiveness of the forward guidance undertaken by European Central Bank using a standard medium-scale DSGE model à la Smets and Wouters (2007). Exploiting data on expectations from surveys, we show that incorporating expectations should be crucial in performance evaluation of...