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...

The empirical literature of stock market predictability mainly suffers from model uncertainty and parameter instability. To meet this challenge, we propose a novel approach that combines the documented merits of diffusion indices, regime-switching models, and forecast combination to predict the...

We develop novel forecasting methods for panel data with heterogeneous parameters and examine them together with existing approaches. We conduct a systematic comparison of their predictive accuracy in settings with different cross-sectional (N) and time (T) dimensions and varying degrees of...

We have argued that from the standpoint of a policy maker, the uncertainty of using the average forecast is not the variance of the average, but rather the average of the variances of the individual forecasts that incorporate idiosyncratic risks. With a slight reformulation of the loss function...

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...

Survey forecasts are prone to entry and exit of forecasters as well as forecasters not contributing every period leading to gaps. These gaps make it difficult to compare individual forecasters to each other and raises the question of how to deal with the missing observations. This is addressed...

This paper is concerned with the problem of variable selection when the marginal effects of signals on the target variable as well as the correlation of the covariates in the active set are allowed to vary over time, without committing to any particular model of parameter instabilities. It poses...

To date, only annual information on economic activity is published for the 16 German states. In this paper, we calculate quarterly regional GDP estimates for the period between 1995 to 2021, thereby improving the regional database for Germany. The new data set will regularly be updated when...

Accurate real-time macroeconomic data are essential for policy-making and economic nowcasting. In this paper, I introduce a real-time database for German regional economic accounts (READ-GER). The database contains real-time information for nine macroeconomic aggregates and the 16 German states....

In this paper, we use high-frequency transaction data to develop a weekly tracker for private consumption expenditures. Furthermore, we apply the transaction data in a nowcasting experiment and compare their performance with other, readily available indicators that are regularly linked to...