Most macroeconomic data are uncertain - they are estimates rather than perfect measures. Use of these uncertain data to form an assessment of current activity can be viewed as a problem of signal extraction. One symptom of that uncertainty is the propensity of statistical agencies to revise...

We estimate a time varying parameter structural macroeconomic model of the UK economy, using a Bayesian local likelihood methodology. This enables us to estimate a large open-economy DSGE model over a sample that comprises several different regimes and an incomplete set of data. Our estimation...

Forecasts play a critical role at inflation-targeting central banks, such as the Bank of England. Breaks in the forecast performance of a model can potentially incur important policy costs. Commonly used statistical procedures, however, implicitly put a lot of weight on type I errors (or false...

By employing large panels of survey data for the UK economy, we aim at reviewing linear approaches for regularisation and dimension reduction combined with techniques from the machine learning literature, like Random Forests, Support Vector Regressions and Neural Networks for forecasting GDP...

We forecast CPI inflation in the United Kingdom up to one year ahead using a large set of monthly disaggregated CPI item series combined with a wide set of forecasting tools, including dimensionality reduction techniques, shrinkage methods and non-linear machine learning models. We find that...

Using a model of deterministic structural change, we revisit several topics in inflation dynamics explored previously using stochastic, time - varying parameter models. We document significant reductions in inflation persistence and predictability. We estimate that changes in the volatility of...

This paper uses kernel methods to estimate a seven variable time-varying (TV) vector autoregressive (VAR) model on the US data set constructed by Smets and Wouters. We use an indirect inference method to map from this TV VAR to time variation in implied Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium...

We consider time series forecasting in the presence of ongoing structural change where both the time-series dependence and the nature of the structural change are unknown. Methods that downweight older data, such as rolling regressions, forecast averaging over different windows and exponentially...

This paper examines the macroeconomic impact of the first round of quantitative easing (QE) by the Bank of England which started in March 2009. Although Bank Rate, the UK policy rate, was reduced to ½%, effectively its lower bound, the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee felt that additional...

In this paper we assess the macroeconomic effects of two of the flagship unconventional monetary policies used by the Bank of England during the later stages of the global economic crisis: additional quantitative easing (QE) and the introduction of the Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS). We argue...