We suggest an alternative use of disaggregate information to forecast the aggregate variable of interest, that is to include disaggregate information or disaggregate variables in the aggregate model as opposed to first forecasting the disaggregate variables separately and then aggregating those...

We propose two new procedures for comparing the mean squared prediction error (MSPE) of a benchmark model to the MSPEs of a small set of alternative models that nest the benchmark. Our procedures compare the benchmark to all the alternative models simultaneously rather than sequentially, and do...

We investigate whether the response of the macro-economy to oil price shocks undergoes episodic changes. Employing a regime-switching vector autoregressive model we identify two regimes that are characterized by qualitatively different patterns in economic activity and inflation following oil...

We analyze real-time forecasts of US inflation over 1999Q3-2019Q4 and subsamples, investigating whether and how forecast accuracy and robustness can be improved with additional information such as expert judgment, additional macroeconomic variables, and forecast combination. The forecasts...

We investigate the transmission of financial shocks through the macroeconomy. To that end we develop an endogenous regime-switching structural vector autoregressive model with time-varying transition probabilities. First, we allow for the transition probabilities to be dependent on the state of...

We conduct a novel empirical analysis of the role of leverage of financial institutions for the transmission of financial shocks to the macroeconomy. For that purpose, we develop an endogenous regime-switching structural vector autoregressive model with time-varying transition probabilities that...

We investigate the role of systemic financial instability in an empirical macrofinancial model for the euro area, employing a richly specified Markov-Switching Vector Autoregression model to capture the dynamic relationships between a set of core macroeconomic variables and a novel indicator of...

To forecast an aggregate, we propose adding disaggregate variables, instead of combining forecasts of those disaggregates or forecasting by a univariate aggregate model. New analytical results show the effects of changing coefficients, mis-specification, estimation uncertainty and...

In this paper we introduce Quasi Likelihood Ratio tests for one sided multivariate hypotheses to evaluate the null that a parsimonious model performs equally well as a small number of models which nest the benchmark. We show that the limiting distributions of the test statistics are...

We investigate co-movements and heterogeneity in inflation dynamics of different regions within and across euro area countries using a novel disaggregate dataset to improve the understanding of inflation differentials in the European Monetary Union. We employ a model where regional inflation...