We propose new indices to measure macroeconomic uncertainty. The indices measure how unexpected a realization of a representative macroeconomic variable is relative to the unconditional forecast error distribution. We use forecast error distributions based on the nowcasts and forecasts of the...

This review provides an overview of forecasting methods that can help researchers forecast in the presence of non-stationarities caused by instabilities. The emphasis of the review is both theoretical and applied, and provides several examples of interest to economists. We show that modeling...

We show the existence of a very short-term relationship at the daily frequency between changes in the price of a country's major commodity export price and changes in its nominal exchange rate. The relationship appears to be robust and to hold when we use contemporaneous (realized) commodity...

This paper proposes a framework to implement regression-based tests of predictive ability in unstable environments, including, in particular, forecast unbiasedness and efficiency tests, commonly referred to as tests of forecast rationality. Our framework is general: it can be applied to...

The main goal of this article is to provide an answer to the question: “Does anything forecast exchange rates, and if so, which variables?” It is well known that exchange rate fluctuations are very difficult to predict using economic models, and that a random walk forecasts exchange rates...