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...

This dissertation contains three applications of time series in finance and macroeconomics. The first essay compares the cumulative returns for stocks and bonds atinvestment horizons from one to ten years by using a test for spatial dominance.Spatial dominance is a variation of stochastic...

The present dissertation consists of three stand-alone research papers that all deal with factor models from a Bayesian perspective, both in a theoretical and an empirical setup. More precisely, the thesis is organized in a progressive way as follows: Chapter 1 briefly presents the general...

Bayesian nonparametric methods are useful for modeling data without having to define the complexity of the entire model a priori, but rather allowing for this complexity to be determined by the data. Two problems considered in this dissertation are the number of components in a mixture model,...

The research presented in this thesis addresses different aspects of dynamic portfolio construction and portfolio risk measurement. It brings the research on dynamic portfolio optimization, replicating portfolio construction, dynamic portfolio risk measurement and volatility forecast together....

GARCH models are commonly used as latent processes in econometrics, financial economics, and macroeconomics. Yet no exact likelihood analysis of these models has been provided so far. In this paper we outline the issues and suggest a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm which allows the...