This paper examines the characteristics of firms that voluntarily provide interim financial reports. Based on a sample of Swiss companies, where semi-annual reports became mandatory in 1997, I document that before interim reports became mandatory, analyst coverage, i.e. analysts demand for...

We present a multi-period mean-variance optimization program which allows for a joint optimization of the balance and off-balance sheet. Our first finding is the proof of a conjecture of Li and Ng (cf. [LN00]), Leippold, Trojani and Vanini (cf. [LTV04], [LTV03]) about the equivalence of the...

This paper examines the characteristics of firms that voluntarily provide interim financial reports. Based on a sample of Swiss companies, where semi-annual reports became mandatory in 1997, I document that before interim reports became mandatory, analyst coverage, i.e. analysts’ demand for...

We test for state-dependent bias in the European Central Bank's inflation projections. We show that the ECB tends to underpredict when the observed inflation rate at the time of forecasting is higher than an estimated threshold of 1.8%. The bias is most pronounced at intermediate forecasting...

Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve, as a structural model of inflation dynamics, has mostly been used to explain past inflation developments, but has hardly been used for forecasting purposes. We propose a method of forecasting inflation based on the present-value formulation of the hybrid New...

We analyze how modeling international dependencies improves forecasts for the global economy based on a Bayesian GVAR with SSVS prior and stochastic volatility. To analyze the source of performance gains, we decompose the predictive joint density into its marginals and a copula term capturing...

Aggregate demand forecasting, also known as nowcasting when it applies to current quarter assessment, is of notable interest to policy makers. This paper concentrates on the empirical methods dealing with mixed-frequency data. In particular, it focuses on the MIDAS approach and its later...

Various inflation forecasting models are compared using a simulated out-of-sample forecasting framework. We focus on the question of whether monetary aggregates are useful for forecasting inflation, but unlike previous work we examine a wide range of forecast horizons and allow for estimated as...

Our paper examines the accuracy of growth and inflation forecasts for 19 countries, published by the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany's Joint Diagnosis, or FERI, a private German forecaster, during 2001-2015. Despite dismal accuracy...