A statistical decision rule incorporating judgment does not perform worse than a judgmental decision with a given probability. Under model misspecification, this probability is unknown. The best model is the least misspecified, as it is the one whose probability of underperforming the judgmental...

We compare direct forecasts of HICP and HICP excluding energy and food in the euro area and five member countries to aggregated forecasts of their main components from large Bayesian VARs with a shared set of predictors. We focus on conditional point and density forecasts, in line with...

This paper contributes to the old theme of testing for rationality of inflation expectations in surveys, using two very different surveys in parallel. Focusing on the euro area and using two well-known surveys that include questions on inflation expectations, the Consensus Forecast survey and...

This paper analyses the predictive power of market-based and survey-based inflation expectations for actual inflation. We use the data on inflation swaps and the forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters for the euro area and United States. The results show that both, market-based...

To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first systematic study of the predictive power of monetary aggregates for future inflation for the cross section of New EU Member States. This paper provides stylized facts on monetary versus non-monetary (economic and fiscal) determinants of...

We propose two new procedures for comparing the mean squared prediction error (MSPE) of a benchmark model to the MSPEs of a small set of alternative models that nest the benchmark. Our procedures compare the bench-mark to all the alternative models simultaneously rather than sequentially, and do...

We propose a new method for multivariate forecasting which combines Dynamic Factor and multivariate GARCH models. The information contained in large datasets is captured by few dynamic common factors, which we assume being conditionally heteroskedastic. After presenting the model, we propose a...