The goal of this paper is to develop formal tests to evaluate the relative in-sample performance of two competing, misspecified, non-nested models in the presence of possible data instability. Compared to previous approaches to model selection, which are based on measures of global performance,...

The recent financial crisis has highlighted the fragility of the US (and other countries') financial system under several respects. In this paper, the properties of a summary index of financial fragility, obtained by combining information conveyed by the "Agency", "Ted" and "BAA-AAA" spreads,...

We propose a measure of core inflation which is derived from a Markov switching ARFIMA model. The Markov switching ARFIMA model generalises the standard ARFIMA model allowing mean reversion to take place with respect to a changing unconditional mean. By imposing a coswitching restriction for...

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 study real oil price dynamics have been assessed over few important episodes since the 1990s. The evidence provides support to the demand side view: in this respect, macroeconomic shocks would appear to be the major upward driver of the real oil price over the whole period investigated,...

Recently, it has been suggested that macroeconomic forecasts from estimated DSGE models tend to be more accurate out-of-sample than random walk forecasts or Bayesian VAR forecasts. Del Negro and Schorfheide(2013) in particular suggest that the DSGE model forecast should become the benchmark for...

While forecasting is a common practice in academia, government and business alike, practitioners are often left wondering how to choose the sample for estimating forecasting models. When we forecast inflation in 2014, for example, should we use the last 30 years of data or the last 10 years of...

This review provides an overview of forecasting methods that can help researchers forecast in the presence of non-stationarities caused by instabilities. The emphasis of the review is both theoretical and applied, and provides several examples of interest to economists. We show that modeling...

What is the role of financial speculation in determining the real oil price? We find that while macroeconomic shocks have been the major upward driver of the real oil price since the mid 1980s, also financial shocks have sizably contributed since the early 2000s, and at a much larger extent...

In this paper the oil price-macroeconomy relationship is investigated from a global perspective, by means of a large scale macro-financial-econometric model. In addition to real activity, fiscal and monetary policy responses and labor and financial markets are considered as well. We find that...