Academics and practitioners have long recognized the importance of a firm’s industry membership in explaining its financial performance. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, recent research shows that industry-specific profitability forecasting models are not better than economy-wide models. This paper re-examines the incremental advantage of industry-specific models. We find considerable indu...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper proposes a new way of computing a coincident indic...

This paper develops bootstrap methods for testing whether, in a finite sample, competing out-of-sample forecasts from nested models are equally accurate. Most prior work on forecast tests for nested models has focused on a null hypothesis of equal accuracy in population — basically, whether coefficients on the extra variables in the larger, nesting model are zero. We instead use an asymptotic a...

We find that covariance matrix forecasts for an international interest rate portfolio generated by a model that incorporates interest-rate level volatility effects perform best with respect to statistical loss functions. However, within a value-at-risk (VaR) framework, the relative performance of the covariance matrix forecasts depends greatly on the VaR distributional assumption. Simple foreca...

While economic variables have been used extensively to forecast the U.S. bond risk premia, little attention has been paid to the use of technical indicators which are widely employed by practitioners. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying the predictive ability of using a variety of technical indicators vis-á-vis the economic variables. We find that the technical indicators have significa...

This paper applies the Model Confidence Set (MCS) procedure of Hansen, Lunde, and Nason (2003) to a set of volatility models. A MCS is analogous to confidence interval of a parameter in the sense that the former contains the best forecasting model with a certain probability. The key to the MCS is that it acknowledges the limitations of the information in the data. The empirical exercise is base...

A practice that has become widespread is that of comparing forecasts of financial return variability obtained from discrete time models against high frequency estimates based on continuous time theory. In explanatory financial return variability modelling this raises several methodological and practical issues, which suggests an alternative framework is needed. The contribution of this study is...

We develop a specification test of predictive densities based on that the generalized residuals of correctly specified predictive density models are i.i.d. uniform. The proposed sequential test examines the hypotheses of serial independence and uniformity in two stages, wherein the first stage test of serial independence is robust to violation of uniformity. The approach of data driven smooth t...

The paper considers the conjecture that forecasts from preferred economic models or theories d-separate forecasts from less preferred models or theories from the actual realization of the variable for which a scientific explanation is sought. Dseparation provides a succinct notion to represent forecast dominance of one set of forecasts over another; it provides, as well, a criterion for model p...