According to the Rockets and Feathers hypothesis (RFH), the transmission mechanism of positive and negative changes in the price of crude oil to the price of gasoline is asymmetric. Although there have been many contributions documenting that downstream prices are more reactive to increases than...

The primary goal of this paper is to describe several models that are currently used at the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia (NBRM) for short-term forecasting of inflation - Autoregressive integrated moving average models (aggregated and disaggregated approach), three equation...

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...

We suggest the use of an Internet job-search indicator (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt both our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more standard...

We build a time varying DSGE model with financial frictions in order to evaluate changes in the responses of the macroeconomy to financial friction shocks. Using US data, we find that the transmission of the financial friction shock to economic variables, such as output growth, has not changed...

DSGE models have recently received considerable attention in macroeconomic analysis and forecasting. They are usually estimated using Bayesian methods, which require the computation of the likelihood function under the assumption that the parameters of the model remain fixed throughout the...

Economic policies are generally formulated on the basis of data available in real time, which might subsequently be revised. Implicitly, the possibility of data revisions creates an element of uncertainty around the very same data driving policy decisions. Given that such uncertainty could be...

This paper investigates the forecasting performance of three popular variants of the non-linear GARCH models, namely VS-GARCH, GJR-GARCH and Q-GARCH, with the symmetric GARCH(1,1) model as a benchmark. The application involves ten European stock price indexes. Forecasts produced by each...