When generating conditional forecasts in dynamic models it is common to impose the conditions as restrictions on future structural shocks. However, these conditional forecasts often ignore that there may be uncertainty about the future development of the restricted variables. Our paper therefore...

There are many indications that formal methods are not used to their full potential by central banks today. In this paper we demonstrate how BVAR and DSGE models can be used to shed light on questions that policy makers deal with in practice using data from Sweden. We compare the forecast...

Micro-founded dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models appear to be particularly suited for evaluating the consequences of alternative macroeconomic policies. Recently, increasing efforts have been undertaken by policymakers to use these models for forecasting, although this proved...

This paper analyzes the performance of the monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index in predicting recessionary regimes of the (quarterly) U.S. GDP. In this regard, the authors apply a mixed-frequency Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MF-MSVAR) model, and compare its in-sample and...

This paper analyzes the performance of the monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index in predicting recessionary regimes of the (quarterly) U.S. GDP. In this regard, the authors apply a mixed-frequency Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MF-MS-VAR) model, and compare its in-sample and...

How much have the dynamics of US time series and in the particular the transmission of innovations to monetary policy instruments changed over the last century? The answers to these questions that this paper gives are "A lot." and "Probably less than you think.", respectively. We use vector...

Credit boom detection methodologies (such as threshold method) lack robustness as they are based on univariate detrending analysis and resort to ratios of credit to real activity. I propose a quantitative indicator to detect atypical behavior of credit from a multivariate system - a monetary...