We look at how large international datasets can improve forecasts of national activity. We use the case of New Zealand, an archetypal small open economy. We apply data-richʺ factor and shrinkage methods to tackle the problem of efficiently handling hundreds of predictor data series from many...

This paper considers factor forecasting with national versus factor forecasting with international data. We forecast German GDP based on a large set of about 500 time series, consisting of German data as well as data from Euro-area and G7 countries. For factor estimation, we consider standard...

The study at hand deals with the expectations of professional analysts and novices in the context of foreign exchange markets. We analyze the respective forecasting accuracy and our results indicate that there exist substantial differences between professional forecasts and judgmental forecasts...

The empirical performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models is more than disappointing. This dismal result is also reflected in the forecasting capabilities of professional analysts: all in all, analysts are not in a position to beat naïve random walk forecasts. The root for this deficient...

The empirical performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models is more than disappointing. This dismal result is also reflected in the forecasting capabilities of professional analysts: all in all, analysts are not in a position to beat native random walk forecasts. The root for this deficient...

We extract principal components from a panel of 17 exchange rates and use the deviations from the components to forecast future exchange rate movements, following the idea in Engel, Mark, and West (2015). Instead of using the standard method, we apply a generalized principal components analysis...

We examine rationality, forecasting accuracy, and economic value of the survey-based exchange rate forecasts for 10 developed and 23 developing countries at the 3-, 12-, and 24-month horizons. Using the data from two surveys for the period from 2004 to 2012, we find strong evidence that the...

Financial crises pose unique challenges for forecast accuracy. Using the IMF's Monitoring of Fund Arrangement (MONA) database, we conduct the most comprehensive evaluation of IMF forecasts to date for countries in times of crises. We examine 29 macroeconomic variables in terms of bias,...

Engel and West (2005) model log exchange rates as discounted log fundamentals. For ‘commodity currencies', commodity prices are often viewed as key fundamentals, implying that commodity prices should, therefore, be predicted by exchange rates and not vice-versa - which would run counter to a...

I examine the forecasting performance, directional accuracy, rationality and economic value of analyst forecasts and characteristics of investment portfolios built from these forecasts for 30 currency pairs from 2006 to 2020. My results show that analyst forecasts perform worse than forecasts...