Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

The share of private consumption in gross domestic product is significant; therefore, private consumption has a great influence on economic growth, which makes it a major concept in economics. The purpose of the paper is to estimate and evaluate different forecasting models for private...

It is commonly accepted that information is helpful if it can be exploited to improve a decision making process. In economics, decisions are often based on forecasts of up- or downward movements of the variable of interest. We point out that directional forecasts can provide a useful framework...

This paper investigates the role of structural imbalance between job seekers and job openings for the forecasting performance of a labour market matching function. Starting from a Cobb-Douglas matching function with constant returns to scale (CRS) in each frictional micro market shows that on...

The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...

This paper investigates the role of mismatch between job seekers and job openings for the forecasting performance of a labor market matching function. In theory, higher mismatch lowers matching efficiency which increases the risk that the vacancies cannot be filled within the usual period of...

The main objective of this study is to assess the usefulness and rationality of the inflation and unemployment rate forecasts made for Romanian by three experts in forecasting: F1, F2 and F3. All the unemployment rate forecasts over the horizon 2001-2013 provided by all experts do not provide...

In this paper, we assess several methods that have been used to measure the Canadian trend unemployment rate (TUR). We also consider improvements and extensions to some existing methods. The assessment is based on four criteria: (i) the extent to which methods provide explanations for changes in...

The internet has become the primary source of information for most of the population in modern economies, and as such, it provides an enormous amount of readily available data. Among these are the data on the internet search queries, which have been shown to improve forecasting models for...