Applied Forecasting

Just as we all eagerly awaited announcement of the $1 million prize winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off(R), every forecasting software vendor has endured the "bake-off" hosted by organizations in the market for new forecasting software.

Software selection teams utilize a bake-off to hel...

IARPA's Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) Program seeks to develop and test methods for generating accurate and timely probabilistic forecasts, leading indicators, and early warning for events, by aggregating the judgments of many widely-dispersed analysts. The Program will develop and test...

This paper surveys efforts to automate the dating of business cycle turning points. Doing this on a real time, out-of-sample basis is a bigger challenge than many academics might presume due to factors such as data revisions and changes in economic relationships over time. The paper stresses the ...

We propose to incorporate cross-sectional heterogeneity into structural VARs. Heterogeneity provides an additional dimension along which one can identify structural shocks and perform hypothesis tests. We provide an application to bank runs, based on microeconomic deposit market data. We impose i...

Since the seminal work of Teece et al. (1994) firm diversification has been found to be a non-random process. The hidden deterministic nature of the diversification patterns is usually detected comparing expected (under a null hypothesys) and actual values of some statistics. Nevertheless the sta...

A wild bootstrap test of the null hypothesis that the errors of a panel data model are not correlated over cross-section units is proposed. The new test is more generally applicable than others that use the restrictive assumptions of normality and homoskedasticity. Monte Carlo results indicate th...

This paper describes how we constructed a real time database for the euro area covering more than 200 series regularly published in the European Central Bank Monthly Bulletin, as made available ahead of publication to the Governing Council members before their first meeting of the month. We descr...