Forecasts of agricultural production and prices are intended to be useful for farmers, governments, and agribusiness industries. Because of the special position of food production in a nation’s security, governments have become both principal suppliers and main users of agricultural forecasts. They need internal forecasts to execute policies that provide technical and market support for the agr...

Consistent with findings in other markets, implied volatility is a biased predictor of the realized volatility of gold futures. No existing explanation—including a price of volatility risk— can completely explain the bias, but much of this apparent bias can be explained by persistence and estimation error in implied volatility. Statistical criteria reject the hypothesis that implied volatility ...

Evidence from social psychology suggests that econometricians will avoid evidence that disconfirms their beliefs. Two beliefs of econometricians were examined: (1) Econometric methods provide more accurate short-term forecasts than do other methods; and (2) more complex econometric methods yield more accurate forecasts. A survey of 21 experts in econometrics found that 95% agreed with the first...

The forecasts accuracy evaluation became a constant preoccupation of specialists in forecasting, because of the failure of predictions that caused the actual economic crisis. The objective of this research is to model and predict some economic variables corresponding too few macroeconomic blocks for Romanian economy. The forecast method is represented by econometric models. Moreover, the accura...

Research in forecasting with Neural Networks (NN) has provided contradictory evidence on their ability to model seasonal time series. Several empirical studies have concluded that time series should be deseasonalised prior to modelling, with contradictory evidence pointing to adequate selection of input vectors. However, the nature of seasonality itself has not been considered: econometric theo...

The information contained in one model’s forecast compared to that in another can be assessed from a regression of actual values on predicted values from the hvo models. We do this for forecasts of real GNP growth rates for different pairs of models. The models include a structural model (the Fair (1976) model), uariour versions of the vector autoregressive (VAR) model, and various versions of ...

As the old saying goes, “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket lest you drop the basket and lose all of your eggs.” Suppose the head of a forecasting division of a company has two sources of forecasts for the company’s sales, one source being the forecasts generated by the division’s econometrics group using an econometric time series model and the other source being the aggregated forecasts...

This study investigates the performance of combination forecasts in the context of international tourism demand. Five econometric and two time-series models are employed to generate individual forecasts. Six combination methods are then employed, and their forecasting performance evaluated, using data on UK outbound tourism demand in seven destination countries. The results suggest that combina...