We analyse the importance of macroeconomic information, such as industrial production index and oil price, for forecasting daily electricity prices in two of the main European markets, Germany and Italy. We do that by means of mixed-frequency models, introducing a Bayesian approach to reverse...

Since the advent of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods in the early 1990s, Bayesian methods have been proposed for a large and growing number of applications. One of the main advantages of Bayesian inference is the ability to deal with many different sources of uncertainty, including data,...

This paper examines the predictive power of weather for electricity prices in day-ahead markets in real time. We find that next-day weather forecasts improve the forecast accuracy of day-ahead electricity prices substantially, suggesting that weather forecasts can price the weather premium....

We argue that the next generation of macro modellers at Inflation Targeting central banks should adapt a methodology from the weather forecasting literature known as `ensemble modelling'. In this approach, uncertainty about model specifications (e.g., initial conditions, parameters, and boundary...

In modelling macroeconomic time series, often a monthly indicator of global real economic activity is used. We propose a new indicator, named World steel production, and compare it to other existing indicators, precisely the Kilian’s index of global real economic activity and the index of OECD...

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...

Central banks' operations and efficiency arguments would suggest that the intraday interest rate should be set to zero. However, a liquidity crisis introduces frictions related to news, which can cause an upward jump of the intraday rate. This paper documents that these dynamics can be partially...

A long strand of literature has shown that the world has become more global. Yet, the recent Great Global Recession turned out to be hard to predict, with forecasters across the world committing large forecast errors. We examine whether knowledge of in-sample co-movement across countries could...

Increasingly, professional forecasters and academic researchers present model-based and subjective or judgment-based forecasts in economics which are accompanied by some measure of uncertainty. In its most complete form this measure is a probability density function for future values of the...

This paper revisits inflation forecasting using reduced-form Phillips curve forecasts, that is, inflation forecasts that use activity and expectations variables. We propose a Phillips-curve-type model that results from averaging across different regression specifications selected from a set of...