In recent years, central banks and international organisations have been making ever greater use of factor models to forecast macroeconomic variables. We examine the performance of these models in forecasting French GDP growth over short horizons. The factors are extracted from a large data set...

The French wholesale market is set to expand in the next few years under European pressure and national decisions. In this paper, we assess the forecasting ability of several classes of time series models for electricity wholesale spot prices at a day-ahead horizon in France. Electricity spot...

In this paper, we investigate the interactions between public debt and transfer policies in a framework based on Floden [2001], that we extend to allow for transitional dynamics between steady states. First, we show that, starting from a high level of public debt, it is possible to implement a...

This paper explores the existence of a bounce-back effect in inventory investment using the European Commission opinion survey on stocks of finished products in manufacturing and retail trade sectors for France, Germany and a European aggregate, from 1985q1 to 2011q4. Our empirical findings...

This paper explores the forecasting abilities of Markov-Switching models. Although MS models generally display a superior in-sample fit relative to linear models, the gain in prediction remains small. We confirm this result using simulated data for a wide range of specifications. In order to...

This paper develops new bridge models to forecast the quarterly GDP growth in France in the short run. We only use data from business survey in the French industry, services and construction. Two alternative methods are considered. The first one relies on the GETS algorithm applied to blocks of...

This paper explores the existence of a bounce-back effect in inventory investment using the European Community opinion survey on stocks of finished products in manufacturing. A threshold autoregression allowing for a transitory strong recovery phasis is estimated for French, German and European...

Surveys of market participants are now widely used in the exchange-rate literature. However, there is no study of academics’views on exchange-rate dynamics. Our paper aims to fill this gap. We conducted a survey of 80 economists in several French universities in November 2002. Most respondents...

In recent years, factor models have received increasing interest from central banks and international organizations to forecast macroeconomic variables. We examine the performance of these models in forecasting the French GDP growth rate over short horizons. The factors are extracted from a...