The relationship between uncertainty and economic activity has attracted substantial interest in recent macroeconomics literature. Empirical work has mostly focused on short-run and medium-term effects of uncertainty shocks. However, there are a number of mechanisms that may cause a response of...

We analyze how to incorporate low frequency information in models for predicting high frequency variables. In doing so, we introduce a new model, the reverse unrestricted MIDAS (RU-MIDAS), which has a periodic structure but can be estimated by simple least squares methods and used to produce...

Small or medium-scale VARs are commonly used in applied macroeconomics for forecasting and evaluating the shock transmission mechanism. This requires the VAR parameters to be stable over the evaluation and forecast sample, or to explicitly consider parameter time variation. The earlier...

We compare alternative forecast pooling methods and 58 forecasts from linear, time-varying and non-linear models, using a very large dataset of about 500 macroeconomic variables for the countries in the European Monetary Union. On average, combination methods work well but single non-linear...

This paper proposes a dating algorithm based on an appropriately defined Markov chain that enforces alternation of peaks and troughs, and duration constraints concerning the phases and the full cycle. The algorithm, which implements Harding and Pagan's non-parametric dating methodology, allows...