In this paper, we empirically assess the extent to which early release inefficiency and definitional change affect prediction precision. In particular, we carry out a series of ex-ante prediction experiments in order to examine: the marginal predictive content of the revision process, the...

Empirical research over the last decade has uncovered predictive relationships between the slope of the yield curve and subsequent real activity and inflation. Some of these relationships are highly significant, but their theoretical motivations suggest that they may not be stable over time. We...

This paper proposes a new procedure for shock identification of macroeconomic forecasts based on factor analysis. Our identification scheme for information shocks relies on data reduction techniques for daily panels and the recognition that macroeconomic releases exhibit a high level of...

This paper examines matched point and density forecasts of inflation from the Survey of Professional Forecasters to analyze the relationship between expected inflation, disagreement, and uncertainty. We extend previous studies through our data construction and estimation methodology....

This paper develops a new approach to change-point modeling that allows for an unknown number of change points in the observed sample. Our model assumes that regime durations have a Poisson distribution. The model approximately nests the two most common approaches: the time-varying parameter...

This paper considers the problem of forecasting real and financial macroeconomic variables across a large number of countries in the global economy. To this end, a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model previously estimated over the 1979:Q1-2003:Q4 period by Dees, de Mauro, Pesaran, and Smith...

Prediction markets - markets used to forecast future events - have been used to accurately forecast the outcome of political contests, sporting events, and, occasionally, economic outcomes. This chapter summarizes the latest research on prediction markets in order to further their utilization by...

The increasing use of demand-side management as a tool to reliably meet electricity demand at peak time has stimulated interest among researchers, consumers and producer organizations, managers, regulators and policymakers, This research reviews the growing literature on models used to study...

In the framework of a standard overlapping generations model, it is shown that active inflation forecast targeting reinforces mechanisms that lead to indeterminacy of the monetary steady state and to countercyclical behavior of young-age consumption. The inflation forecast targeting rule which...

The paper addresses the issue of forecasting a large set of variables using multivariate models. In particular, we propose three alternative reduced rank forecasting models and compare their predictive performance with the most promising existing alternatives, namely, factor models, large scale...