This paper introduces a new test of the predictive performance and market timing for categorical forecasts based on contingency tables when the user has non-categorical loss functions. For example, a user might be interested in the return of an underlying variable instead of just the direction....

We have argued that from the standpoint of a policy maker who has access to a number of expert forecasts, the uncertainty of a combined forecast should be interpreted as that of a typical forecaster randomly drawn from the pool. With a standard factor decomposition of a panel of forecasts, we...

This paper documents the existence of Political Forecast Cycles. In a theoretical model of political selection, we show that governments release overly optimistic GDP growth forecasts ahead of elections to increase the reelection probability. The bias arises from lack of commitment if voters are...

Using a unique dataset of 22.5 million news articles from the Dow Jones Newswires Archive, we perform an in depth real-time out-of-sample forecasting comparison study with one of the most widely used data sets in the newer forecasting literature, namely the FRED-MD dataset. Focusing on U.S. GDP,...

We examine forecast accuracy and efficiency of the Social Security Administration’s projections for cost rate, trust fund balance, trust fund ratio made during 1980-2020 with horizons up to 95 years. We find that the reported deterioration in the accuracy of the forecasts during 2010’s has...

This paper evaluates the predictive content of a set of alternative monthly indicators of global economic activity for nowcasting and forecasting quarterly world GDP using mixed-frequency models. We find that a recently proposed indicator that covers multiple dimensions of the global economy...

This paper proposes a new method of forecasting euro area quarterly real GDP that uses area-wide indicators, which are derived by optimally pooling the information contained in national indicator series. Following the ideas of predictive modeling, we construct the area-wide indicators by...

This paper characterizes the asymptotic behaviour, as the number of assets gets arbitrarily large, of the portfolio weights for the class of tangency portfolios belonging to the Markowitz paradigm. It is assumed that the joint distribution of asset returns is characterized by a general factor...

The paper illustrates and evaluates a Kalman filtering method for forecasting German real GDP at monthly intervals. German real GDP is produced at quarterly intervals but analysts and decision makers often want monthly GDP forecasts. Quarterly GDP could be regressed on monthly indicators, which...