This paper surveys recent developments in the evaluation of point forecasts. Taking West’s (2006) survey as a starting point, we briefly cover the state of the literature as of the time of West’s writing. We then focus on recent developments, including advancements in the evaluation of...

This paper shows entropic tilting to be a flexible and powerful tool for combining medium-term forecasts from BVARs with short-term forecasts from other sources (nowcasts from either surveys or other models). Tilting systematically improves the accuracy of both point and density forecasts, and...

Small or medium-scale VARs are commonly used in applied macroeconomics for forecasting and evaluating the shock transmission mechanism. This requires the VAR parameters to be stable over the evaluation and forecast sample, or to explicitly consider parameter time variation. The earlier...

In this paper we examine how the forecasting performance of Bayesian VARs is affected by a number of specification choices. In the baseline case, we use a Normal-Inverted Wishart prior that, when combined with a (pseudo-) iterated approach, makes the analytical computation of multi-step...

This paper examines the asymptotic and finite-sample properties of tests of equal forecast accuracy applied to direct, multi-step predictions from both non-nested and nested linear regression models. In contrast to earlier work -- including West (1996), Clark and McCracken (2001, 2005),and...

Motivated by the common finding that linear autoregressive models forecast better than models that incorporate additional information, this paper presents analytical, Monte Carlo, and empirical evidence on the effectiveness of combining forecasts from nested models. In our analytics, the...

This paper sifts through potential explanations for the weakness of the existing out-of-sample evidence on the Phillips curve relative to the in-sample evidence, focusing on models relating inflation to the output gap. The out-of-sample evidence could be weaker because, even when the models are...

This paper presents analytical, Monte Carlo, and empirical evidence on the effectiveness of combining recursive and rolling forecasts when linear predictive models are subject to structural change. We first provide a characterization of the bias-variance tradeoff faced when choosing between...

We examine the asymptotic and finite-sample properties of tests for equal forecast accuracy and encompassing applied to 1-step ahead forecasts from nested parametric models. We first derive the asymptotic distributions of two standard tests and one new test of encompassing. Tables of...

This paper presents analytical, Monte Carlo, and empirical evidence on the effects of structural breaks on tests for equal forecast accuracy and forecast encompassing. The forecasts are generated from two parametric, linear models that are nested under the null. The alternative hypotheses allow...