For forecasting and economic analysis many variables are used in logarithms (logs). In time series analysis this transformation is often considered to stabilize the variance of a series. We investigate under which conditions taking logs is beneficial for forecasting. Forecasts based on the...

In this paper we argue that future inflation in an economy depends on the way people perceive current inflation, their inflation sentiment. We construct some simple measures of inflation sentiment which capture whether price acceleration is shared by many components of the CPI basket. In a...

A couple of recent papers have shifted the focus towards disagreement of professional forecasters. When dealing with survey data that is sampled at a frequency higher than annual and that includes only fixed event forecasts, e.g. expectation of average annual growth rates measures of...

The dates of U.S. business cycle are reported by NBER with a considerable delay, so an early notion of turning points is of particular interest. This paper proposes a novel sequential approach designed for timely signaling these turning points. A directional cumulated sum decision rule is...

We examine the performance of volatility models that incorporate features such as long (short) memory, regime-switching and multifractality along with two competing distributional assumptions of the error component, i.e. Normal vs Student-t. Our precise contribution is twofold. First, we...

Neben Frühindikatoren und Übertragungsmechanismen werden Lösungsansätze diskutiert. Bei den multilateralen Ansätzen führt die Einführung von Referenzzonen nicht weiter, die Behinderung des internationalen Kapitalverkehrs ist mit erheblichen Wohlfahrtsverlusten verbunden. Der...

When nontraded goods prices are accounted for consistently and genuine stock data on bilateral foreign asset holdings is employed, a modified sticky-price exchange rate model by far outperforms the benchmark random walk-model in empirically forecasting the D-mark/dollar parity out of sample....

Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. While this statement is widely accepted in terms of a long-run relationship, the quantity theory has been made operational also for the short-run dynamics of inflation by so-called Pstar models. An error correction model with quarterly data for the Euro Area...

Untersuchungen zur Prognosegüte sollten nicht nur Prognosefehler, die auf der Schätzung der Parameter beruhen, berücksichtigen, sondern auch solche, die aus der stichprobenabhängigen Auswahl des Prognosemodells resultieren. Wird die Prognosefehlervarianz durch rekursive Out-of-Sample...

This paper proposes an approach for estimating the uncertainty associated with model-based macroeconomic forecasts. We argue that estimated forecast intervals should account for the uncertainty arising from selecting the specification of an empirical forecasting model from the sample data. To...