Many forecasts are conditional in nature. For example, a number of central banks routinely report forecasts conditional on particular paths of policy instruments. Even though conditional forecasting is common, there has been little work on or with methods for evaluating conditional forecasts. This paper provides analytical, Monte Carlo, and empirical evidence on tests of predictive ability for ...

The paper explores the linkage between equity and commodity markets, focusing in particular on its evolution over time. It documents that a country’s equity market value has significant out-of-sample predictive ability for the future global commodity price index for several primary commodity-exporting countries. The out-of-sample predictive ability of the equity market appears around 2000s. The...

Experimental data have consistently shown diversity in beliefs as well as in actions among experimental subjects. This paper presents and compares alternative behavioral econometric models for the characterization of player heterogeneity, both between sub-populations of players and within subpopulations. In particular, two econometric models of diversity within sub-populations of players are in...

This paper proposes a simple chartist-fundamentalist model in which we allow for nonlinear time variation in chartists’ extrapolation rate. Estimation of the model using monthly data for the major currencies vis-a-vis the US dollar shows that the model is significant in-sample and that it has out-of-sample predictive power for some of the currencies. We investigate the power of tests of the ran...

We consider model selection facing uncertainty over the choice of variables and the occurrence and timing of multiple location shifts. General-to-simple selection is extended by adding an impulse indicator for every observation to the set of candidate regressors: see Johansen and Nielsen (2009). We apply that approach to a fat-tailed distribution, and to processes with breaks: Monte Carlo exper...

The simulated results of this paper show that New Keynesian DSGE models with capital accumulation can generate substantial persistencies in the dynamics of the main economic variables, due to the stock nature of capital. Empirical estimates on U.S. data from 1960:I to 2008:I show the response of monetary policy to inflation was almost twice lower than traditionally considered, as capital accumu...

Well known encompassing tests are usually difficult to implement because it is difficult to compute the pseudo-true value of the quasi-maximum likelihood estimator. In this paper, we propose a more operational encompassing test that does not involve such pseudo-true value. Instead, the proposed test relies on the “pseudo-true score” which is relatively easier to evaluate. We show that this test...

The title compound, C(13)H(10)Cl(2)N(2)S, represents a monoclinic polymorph of the previously reported ortho-rhom-bic form [Ramnathan et al. (1996 ▶). Acta Cryst. C52, 134-136]. The mol-ecule is twisted with the dihedral angle between the benzene rings being 55.37 (7)°. The N-H atoms are syn to each other, which contrasts their anti disposition in the ortho-rhom-bic form. In the crystal, mol-ec...

This paper analyzes the application of the Markov-switching ARCH model (Hamilton and Susmel, 1994) in improving value-at-risk (VaR) forecast. By considering a mixture of normal distributions with varying variances over different time and regimes, we find that the “spurious high persistence” found in the GARCH model is adjusted. Under relative performance and hypothesis-testing evaluations, the ...

The use of log-transformed data has become standard in macroeconomic forecasting with VAR models. However, its appropriateness in the context of out-of-sample forecasts has not yet been exposed to a thorough empirical investigation. With the aim of filling this void, a broad sample of VAR models is employed in a multi-country setup and approximately 16 Mio. pseudo-out-of-sample forecasts are ev...