A number of highly cited papers by Flyvbjerg and associates have shown that ex ante infrastructure appraisals tend to be overly optimistic. Ex post evaluations indicate a bias where investment costs are higher and benefits lower on average than predicted ex ante. These authors argue that the...

Pepper is an important agriculture commodity especially for the state of Sarawak. It is important to forecast its price, as this could help the policy makers in coming up with production and marketing plan to improve the Sarawak’s economy as well as the farmers’welfare. In this paper, we...

In this paper we introduce an analyzing procedure using the Kullback-Leibler information criteria (KLIC) as a statistical tool to evaluate and compare the predictive abilities of possibly misspecified density forecast models. The main advantage of this statistical tool is that we use the...

Being able to choose most suitable volatility model and distribution specification is a more demanding task. This paper introduce an analyzing procedure using the Kullback-Leibler information criteria (KLIC) as a statistical tool to evaluate and compare the predictive abilities of possibly...

For decades, the academic literature has focused on three survey measures of expected inflation: the Livingston Survey, the Survey of Professional Forecasters, and the Michigan Survey. While these measures have been useful in developing models of forecasting inflation, the data are low frequency...

Output gap is generally used in assessing both the inflationary pressures and the cyclical position of a nation’s economy. However, this variable is not observable and must be estimated. In this paper, we accomplish two tasks. First, we estimate the output gap for the United Arab Emirates...

This paper compares forecast performance of linear and nonlinear monetary policy rules using South African data. Recursive forecasts values are computed for 1- to 12-steps ahead for the out-of-sample period 2006:01 to 2010:12. For the nonlinear models we use bootstrap method for multi-step ahead...

The forecast performance of the empirical ESTAR model of Taylor, Peel and Sarno (2001) is examined for 4 bilateral real exchange rate series over an out-of-sample evaluation period of nearly 12 years. Point as well as density forecasts are constructed, considering forecast horizons of 1 to 22...

The forecast performance of the empirical ESTAR model of Taylor et al. (2001) is examined for 4 bilateral real exchange rate series over an out-of-sample evaluation period of nearly 12 years. Point as well as density forecasts are evaluated relative to a simple AR(1) specification, considering...

We show that long horizon forecasts from the nonlinear models that are considered in the study by Rapach andWohar (2006) cannot generate any forecast gains over a simple AR(1) specification. This is contrary to the findings reported in Rapach and Wohar (2006). Moreover, we illustrate graphically...