The Eurosystem/ECB staff macroeconomic projection exercises constitute an important input to the ECB's monetary policy. This work marks a thorough analysis of the Eurosystem/ECB projection errors by looking at criteria of optimality and rationality using techniques widely employed in the applied...

The period of extraordinary volatility in euro area headline inflation starting in 2007 raised the question whether forecast combination methods can be used to hedge against bad forecast performance of single models during such periods and provide more robust forecasts. We investigate this issue...

We analyse the performance of budgetary and growth forecasts of all stability and convergence programmes submitted by EU member states over the last decade. Differences emerge for the bias in budgetary projections across countries. As a second step we explore whether economic, political and...

We propose a theoretical framework for assessing whether a forecast model estimated over one period can provide good forecasts over a subsequent period. We formalize this idea by defining a forecast breakdown as a situation in which the out-of-sample performance of the model, judged by some loss...

In this paper, we propose a framework to evaluate the subjective density forecasts of macroeconomists using micro data from the euro area Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). A key aspect of our analysis is the evaluation of the entire predictive densities, including an evaluation of the...

We propose methods to evaluate the risk assessments collected as part of the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). Our approach focuses on direction-of-change predictions as well as the prediction of relatively more extreme macroeconomic outcomes located in the upper and lower regions of...

In this paper, we exploit micro data from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) to examine the link between the characteristics of macroeconomic density forecasts (such as their location, spread, skewness and tail risk) and density forecast performance. Controlling for the effects of...

In this paper, we explore the potential gains from alternative combinations of the surveyed forecasts in the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters. Our analysis encompasses a variety of methods including statistical combinations based on principal components analysis and trimmed means,...

Commodity prices co-move, but the strength of this co-movement changes over time due to structural factors, like changing energy intensity in production and consumption as well as changing composition of underlying shocks. This paper explores whether econometric models that exploit this...

We study how millions of granular and weekly household scanner data combined with machine learning can help to improve the real-time nowcast of German inflation. Our nowcasting exercise targets three hierarchy levels of inflation: individual products, product groups, and headline inflation. At...