This paper investigates the extent to which the slope of the yield curve in emerging economies predicts domestic inflation and growth. It also examines international financial linkages and how the US and the euro area yield curves help to predict. It finds that the domestic yield curve in...

While fiscal forecasting and monitoring has its roots in the accountability of governments for the use of public funds in democracies, the Stability and Growth Pact has significantly increased interest in budgetary forecasts in Europe, where they play a key role in the EU multilateral budgetary...

With the aim of constructing predictive distributions for daily returns, we introduce a new Markov normal mixture model in which the components are themselves normal mixtures. We derive the restrictions on the autocovariances and linear representation of integer powers of the time series in...

This paper shows that Vector Autoregression with Bayesian shrinkage is an appropriate tool for large dynamic models. We build on the results by De Mol, Giannone, and Reichlin (2008) and show that, when the degree of shrinkage is set in relation to the cross-sectional dimension, the forecasting...

The ECB objective is set in terms of year on year growth rate of the Euro area HICP. Nonetheless, a good deal of attention is given to national data by market analysts when they try to anticipate monetary policy moves. In this paper we use the Generalized Dynamic Factor model to develop a set of...

Standard measures of prices are often contaminated by transitory shocks. This has prompted economists to suggest the use of measures of underlying in?ation to formulate monetary policy and assist in forecasting observed in?ation. Recent work has concentrated on modelling large datasets using...

Bayesian inference in a time series model provides exact, out-of-sample predictive distributions that fully and coherently incorporate parameter uncertainty. This study compares and evaluates Bayesian predictive distributions from alternative models, using as an illustration five alternative...

This paper documents the existence of a significant forecast error on crude oil futures. We interpret it as a risk premium, which, in part, could have been explained by means of a real-time US business cycle indicator, such as the degree of capacity utilization in manufacturing. This result is...

In this paper, we develop financial conditions indices (FCIs) for 3 industrialized (US, Japan, UK) and 5 emerging (China, Brazil, Russia, India, Turkey) economies. The FCIs are formed as the principal component of a range of financial series for each country and are constructed to account for...

This paper uses a panel VAR (PVAR) approach to estimating, analysing, and forecasting price dynamics in four different sectors – industry, services, construction, and agriculture – across the four largest euro area economies – Germany, France, Italy and Spain – and the euro area as a...