Most macroeconomic data are uncertain - they are estimates rather than perfect measures of underlying economic variables. One symptom of that uncertainty is the propensity of statistical agencies to revise their estimates in the light of new information or methodological advances. This paper...

In recent years there has been increasing interest in forecasting methods that utilise large datasets, driven partly by the recognition that policymaking institutions need to process large quantities of information. Factor analysis is one popular way of doing this. Forecast combination is...

Recently, there has been increasing interest in forecasting methods that utilise large datasets. We explore the possibility of forecasting with model averaging using the out-of-sample forecasting performance of various models in a frequentist setting, using the predictive likelihood. We apply...

We propose a new approach to forecasting the term structure of interest rates, which allows to efficiently extract the information contained in a large panel of yields. In particular, we use a large Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) with an optimal amount of shrinkage towards univariate AR...

Detection of structural change is a critical empirical activity, but continuous 'monitoring' of series, for structural changes in real time, raises well-known econometric issues that have been explored in a single series context. If multiple series co-break then it is possible that simultaneous...

This paper develops theoretical results for the estimation of radial basis function neural network specifications, for dependent data, that do not require iterative estimation techniques. Use of the properties of regression based boosting algorithms is made. Both consistency and rate results are...

Testing the rank of a matrix of estimated parameters is key in a large variety of econometric modelling scenarios. This paper describes general methods to test for the rank of a matrix, and provides details on a variety of modelling scenarios in the econometrics literature where these tests are...

In this paper we compared the performance of country specific and regional indicators of reserve adequacy in predicting, out of sample, the balance of payment crisis affecting the South East Asian region during the 1997-98 period. A Dynamic Factor method was used to retrieve reserve adequacy...

This paper revisits a number of data-rich prediction methods, like factor models, Bayesian ridge regression and forecast combinations, which are widely used in macroeconomic forecasting, and compares these with a lesser known alternative method: partial least squares regression. Under the...

Identification in the context of multivariate state space modelling involves the specification of the dimension of the state vector. One identification approach requires an estimate of the rank of a Hankel matrix. The most frequently used approaches of rank determination rely on information...