We investigate whether a class of trend models with various error term structures can improve upon the forecast performance of commonly used time series models when forecasting CPI inflation in Australia. The main result is that trend models tend to provide more accurate point and density...

China has recently overtaken the US to become the world largest importer of crude oil. In light of this fact, we formally compare contributions of demand shocks from China, the US and the rest of the world. We find that China's influence on the real price of oil has increased over the past two...

We introduce a new class of stochastic volatility models with autoregressive moving average (ARMA) innovations. The conditional mean process has a flexible form that can accommodate both a state space representation and a conventional dynamic regression. The ARMA component introduces serial...

Do inflation expectations and the associated pass-through of oil price shocks depend on demand and supply conditions underlying the global market for crude oil? We answer this question with a novel structural vector autoregressive model of the global oil market that jointly identifies...

Contemporary structural models of the global market for crude oil treat storage demand as a composite of precautionary responses to uncertainty and speculative behavior, due to difficulties in jointly identifying these distinct demand components. This difficulty arises because the underlying...

We estimate the effects of domestic and international sources of macroeconomic uncertainty in three commonly studied small open economies (SOEs): Australia, Canada and New Zealand. To this end, we propose a common stochastic volatility in mean panel VAR (CSVM-PVAR), and develop an efficient...

This paper evaluates the real-time forecast performance of alternative Bayesian Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models for the Australian macroeconomy. To this end, we construct an updated vintage database and estimate a set of model specifications with different covariance structures. The results...