The performance and economic value of public outlook forecasts has been of continuing interest to agricultural economists and market participants. This dissertation provide new and powerful evidence on the performance of outlook forecasts relative to futures prices in hog and cattle markets over...

Replaced with revised version of paper 11/17/06. Former title: Forecasting Food Price Inflation, Challenges for Central Banks in Developing Countries using an Inflation Targeting Framework: the Case of Colombia

This paper investigates whether the accuracy of outlook hog price forecasts can be improvedusing composite forecasts in an out-of-sample context. Price forecasts from four wellrecognizedoutlook programs are combined with futures-based forecasts, ARIMA, andunrestricted Vector Autoregressive (VAR)...

Surveys of Professional Forecasters produce precise and timely point forecasts for key macroeconomic variables. However, the accompanying density forecasts are not as widely utilized, and there is no consensus about their quality. This is partly because such surveys are often conducted for...

En este artículo se introducen nuevos esquemas de ponderación para promediar de modelos econométricos cuando se está interesado en combinar predicciones de variables discretas provenientes de modelos con cambios de régimen markoviano. En una aplicación empírica, se pronostican los puntos...

Investment in network infrastructure can boost long-term economic growth in OECD countries. Moreover, infrastructure investment can have a positive effect on growth that goes beyond the effect of the capital stock because of economies of scale, the existence of network externalities competition...

Accurate short-term wind speed forecasts for utility-scale wind farms will be crucial for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) goal of providing 20% of total power from wind by 2030. For typical pitch-controlled wind turbines, power output varies as the cube of wind speed over a significant...

Model uncertainty hampers consensus on the key determinants of economic growth. Some recent cross-country cross-sectional analyses have employed Bayesian Model Averaging to tackle the issue of model uncertainty. This paper extends that approach to panel data models with country-specific fixed...

La Productividad Total de los Factores (PTF) representa una proporción importante de las diferencias de crecimiento económico entre países. Con el objetivo de entender las fuentes estas diferencias dos cuestiones son de vital importancia: por un lado, el crecimiento de la PTF es difícil de...

Model uncertainty hampers consensus on the main determinants of corporate default. We employ Bayesian model averaging (BMA) techniques in order to shed light on this issue. Empirical findings suggest that the most robust determinants of corporate default are firm-specific variables such as the...