Forecasts are useless whenever the forecast error variance fails to be smaller than the unconditional variance of the target variable. This paper develops tests for the null hypothesis that forecasts become uninformative beyond some limiting forecast horizon h. Following Diebold and Mariano (DM,...

A longstanding finding in the forecasting literature is that averaging forecasts from different models often improves upon forecasts based on a single model, with equal weight averaging working particularly well. This paper analyzes the effects of trimming the set of models prior to averaging....

This chapter presents a unified set of estimation methods for fitting a rich array of models describing dynamic relationships within a longitudinal data setting. The discussion surveys approaches for characterizing the micro dynamics of continuous dependent variables both over time and across...

Measurable aspects of the economic convergence of EU countries form the main topic of this paper. For this purpose, statistical and econometric methods are presented and applied for revealing characteristic elements of such a process. A first group of methods refers mainly to aspects such as:...

This paper reinterprets Maganelli's (2009) idea of "Forecasting with Judgment" to obtain a dynamic algorithm for combining survey data and time series models for macroeconomic forecasting. Unlike existing combination approaches which typically assign weights to alternative forecasts, the...

The accuracy of variance prediction depends on both the specification and the accuracy of parameter estimation. To predict stock return variance in a large and ever-changing universe, this paper proposes to replace the classic time-series dynamics specification per each name with a...

The contribution of this paper is to offer a rationale for the observed seasonal pattern in house prices. We first document seasonality in house prices for the US and the UK using formal statistical tests and illustrate its quantitative importance. In the second part of the paper we employ a...