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 a range of new forecasting...

We develop a theoretical framework for understanding how agents form expectations about economic variables with a partially predictable component. Our model incorporates the effect of measurement errors and heterogeneity in individual forecasters' prior beliefs and their information signals and...

Forecast rationality under squared error loss implies various bounds on second moments of the data across forecast horizons. For example, the mean squared forecast error should be increasing in the horizon, and the mean squared forecast should be decreasing in the horizon. We propose rationality...

In this paper we assess the possibility of producing unbiased forecasts for fiscal variables in the euro area by comparing a set of procedures that rely on different information sets and econometric techniques. In particular, we consider ARMA models, VARs, small scale semi-structural models at...

Strongly periodic series occur frequently in many disciplines. This paper reviews one specific approach to analyzing such series viz. the harmonic regression approach. In this paper, the five major methods suggested under this approach are critically reviewed and compared, and their empirical...

It is standard in applied work to select forecasting models by ranking candidate models by their prediction mean squared error (PMSE) in simulated out-of-sample (SOOS) forecasts. Alternatively, forecast models may be selected using information criteria (IC). We compare the asymptotic and...

The empirical performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models is more than disappointing. This dismal result is also reflected in the forecasting capabilities of professional analysts: all in all, analysts are not in a position to beat naïve random walk forecasts. The root for this deficient...

In this Paper we evaluate the relative performance of linear, non-linear and time-varying models for about 500 macroeconomic variables for the countries in the Euro area, using a real-time forecasting methodology. It turns out that linear models work well for about 35% of the series under...

We document the empirical properties of revisions to major macroeconomic variables in the United States. Our findings suggest that they do not satisfy simple desirable statistical properties. In particular, we find that these revisions do not have a zero mean, which indicates that the initial...