Download or read book Financial Information and Macroeconomic Forecasts written by Sophia Chen and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2017-01-18 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study the forecasting power of financial variables for macroeconomic variables for 62 countries between 1980 and 2013. We find that financial variables such as credit growth, stock prices and house prices have considerable predictive power for macroeconomic variables at one to four quarters horizons. A forecasting model with financial variables outperforms the World Economic Outlook (WEO) forecasts in up to 85 percent of our sample countries at the four quarters horizon. We also find that cross-country panel models produce more accurate out-of-sample forecasts than individual country models.

Download or read book Macroeconomic Forecasting in the Era of Big Data written by Peter Fuleky and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys big data tools used in macroeconomic forecasting and addresses related econometric issues, including how to capture dynamic relationships among variables; how to select parsimonious models; how to deal with model uncertainty, instability, non-stationarity, and mixed frequency data; and how to evaluate forecasts, among others. Each chapter is self-contained with references, and provides solid background information, while also reviewing the latest advances in the field. Accordingly, the book offers a valuable resource for researchers, professional forecasters, and students of quantitative economics.

Download or read book Incorporating Macro Financial Linkages into Forecasts Using Financial Conditions Indices The Case of France written by Ms.Piyabha Kongsamut and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can information on financial conditions be used to better understand macroeconomic developments and improve macroeconomic projections? We investigate this question for France by constructing country-specific financial conditions indices (FCIs) that are tailored to movements in GDP, investment, private consumption and exports respectively. We rely on a VAR approach to estimate the weights of the financial components of each FCI, including equity market returns (which turn out having a relatively strong weight across all FCIs), private sector risk premiums, long-term interest rates, and banks’ credit standards. We find that the tailored FCIs are useful as leading indicators of GDP, investment, and exports, and as a contemporaneous indicator of private consumption. Credit volumes turn out to be lagging indicators of growth. The indices inform us on macro-financial linkages in France and are used to improve the accuracy of quarterly forecasting models and high-frequency “nowcast” models. We show that FCI-augmented models could have significantly improved forecasts during and after the global financial crisis.

Download or read book Macrofinancial Causes of Optimism in Growth Forecasts written by Mr. Yan Carriere-Swallow and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We analyze the causes of the apparent bias towards optimism in growth forecasts underpinning the design of IMF-supported programs, which has been documented in the literature. We find that financial variables observable to forecasters are strong predictors of growth forecast errors. The greater the expansion of the credit-to-GDP gap in the years preceding a program, the greater its over-optimism about growth over the next two years. This result is strongest among forecasts that were most optimistic, where errors are also increasing in the economy’s degree of liability dollarization. We find that the inefficient use of financial information applies to growth forecasts more broadly, including the IMF’s forecasts in the World Economic Outlook and those produced by professional forecasters compiled by Consensus Economics. We conclude that improved macrofinancial analysis represents a promising avenue for reducing over-optimism in growth forecasts.

Download or read book The Role of Financial Variables in Predicting Economic Activity in the Euro Area written by Mr.Raphael A. Espinoza and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2009-11-01 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. business cycle typically leads the European cycle by a few quarters and this can be used to forecast euro area GDP. We investigate whether financial variables carry additional information. We use vector autoregressions (VARs) which include the U.S. and the euro area GDPs as a minimal set of variables as well as growth in the Rest of the World (an aggregation of seven small countries) and selected combinations of financial variables. Impulse responses (in-sample) show that shocks to financial variables influence real activity. However, according to out-of-sample forecast exercises using the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) metric, this macro-financial linkage would be weak: financial indicators do not improve short and medium term forecasts of real activity in the euro area, even when their timely availability, relative to GDP, is exploited. This result is partly due to the 'average' nature of the RMSE metric: when forecasting ability is assessed as if in real time (conditionally on the information available at the time of the forecast), we find that models using financial variables would have been preferred, ex ante, in several episodes, in particular between 1999 and 2002. This result suggests that one should not discard, on the basis of RMSE statistics, the use of predictive models that include financial variables if there is a theoretical prior that a financial shock is affecting growth.

Download or read book Understanding Economic Forecasts written by David F. Hendry and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to interpret and evaluate economic forecasts and the uncertainties inherent in them.

Download or read book Incorporating Macro financial Linkages Into Forecasts Using Financial Conditions Indices written by Piyabha Kongsamut and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can information on financial conditions be used to better understand macroeconomic developments and improve macroeconomic projections? We investigate this question for France by constructing country-specific financial conditions indices (FCIs) that are tailored to movements in GDP, investment, private consumption and exports respectively. We rely on a VAR approach to estimate the weights of the financial components of each FCI, including equity market returns (which turn out having a relatively strong weight across all FCIs), private sector risk premiums, long-term interest rates, and banks’ credit standards. We find that the tailored FCIs are useful as leading indicators of GDP, investment, and exports, and as a contemporaneous indicator of private consumption. Credit volumes turn out to be lagging indicators of growth. The indices inform us on macro-financial linkages in France and are used to improve the accuracy of quarterly forecasting models and high-frequency “nowcast” models. We show that FCI-augmented models ould have significantly improved forecasts during and after the global financial crisis.

Download or read book How Useful are Financial Market Data in Macroeconomic Forecasts written by Fady Nagy Barsoum and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Modelling and Forecasting Financial Data written by Abdol S. Soofi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modelling and Forecasting Financial Data brings together a coherent and accessible set of chapters on recent research results on this topic. To make such methods readily useful in practice, the contributors to this volume have agreed to make available to readers upon request all computer programs used to implement the methods discussed in their respective chapters. Modelling and Forecasting Financial Data is a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students studying complex systems in finance, biology, and physics, as well as those applying such methods to nonlinear time series analysis and signal processing.

Download or read book Economic Forecasting written by Graham Elliott and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and integrated approach to economic forecasting problems Economic forecasting involves choosing simple yet robust models to best approximate highly complex and evolving data-generating processes. This poses unique challenges for researchers in a host of practical forecasting situations, from forecasting budget deficits and assessing financial risk to predicting inflation and stock market returns. Economic Forecasting presents a comprehensive, unified approach to assessing the costs and benefits of different methods currently available to forecasters. This text approaches forecasting problems from the perspective of decision theory and estimation, and demonstrates the profound implications of this approach for how we understand variable selection, estimation, and combination methods for forecasting models, and how we evaluate the resulting forecasts. Both Bayesian and non-Bayesian methods are covered in depth, as are a range of cutting-edge techniques for producing point, interval, and density forecasts. The book features detailed presentations and empirical examples of a range of forecasting methods and shows how to generate forecasts in the presence of large-dimensional sets of predictor variables. The authors pay special attention to how estimation error, model uncertainty, and model instability affect forecasting performance. Presents a comprehensive and integrated approach to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of different forecasting methods Approaches forecasting from a decision theoretic and estimation perspective Covers Bayesian modeling, including methods for generating density forecasts Discusses model selection methods as well as forecast combinations Covers a large range of nonlinear prediction models, including regime switching models, threshold autoregressions, and models with time-varying volatility Features numerous empirical examples Examines the latest advances in forecast evaluation Essential for practitioners and students alike

Download or read book Economic Forecasting written by N. Carnot and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-08-12 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic Forecasting provides a comprehensive overview of macroeconomic forecasting. The focus is first on a wide range of theories as well as empirical methods: business cycle analysis, time series methods, macroeconomic models, medium and long-run projections, fiscal and financial forecasts, and sectoral forecasting. In addition, the book addresses the main issues surrounding the use of forecasts (accuracy, communication challenges) and their policy implications. A tour of the economic data and forecasting institutions is also provided.

Download or read book Financial Nowcasts and Their Usefulness in Macroeconomic Forecasting written by Edward S. Knotek and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Financial data often contain information that is helpful for macroeconomic forecasting, while multistep forecast accuracy also benefits by incorporating good nowcasts of macroeconomic variables. This paper considers the role of nowcasts of financial variables in making conditional forecasts of real and nominal macroeconomic variables using standard quarterly Bayesian vector autoregressions (BVARs). For nowcasting the quarterly value of a variety of financial variables, we document that the average of the available daily data and a daily random walk forecast to fill in the missing days in the quarter typically outperforms other nowcasting approaches. Using real-time data and out-of-sample forecasting exercises, we find that the inclusion of financial variable nowcasts by themselves generally improves forecast accuracy for macroeconomic variables relative to unconditional forecasts, although we document several exceptions in which current-quarter forecast accuracy worsens with the inclusion of the financial nowcasts. Incorporating financial nowcasts and nowcasts of macroeconomic variables generally improves the forecast accuracy for all the macroeconomic indicators of interest, beyond including the nowcasts of the macroeconomic variables alone. Conditional forecasts generated from quarterly BVARs augmented with nowcasts of key financial variables rival the forecast accuracy of mixed-frequency dynamic factor models (MF-DFMs) and mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) models that explicitly link the quarterly data and forecasts to high-frequency financial data.

Download or read book Macroeconomic Forecasting written by Robert Evans and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-22 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on interviews with the UK government's Panel of Independent Forecasters, the author shows how economic models, forecasts and policy analysis depend crucially upon the judgements of economists.

Download or read book Economic Forecasting and Policy written by N. Carnot and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-07-26 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic Forecasting provides a comprehensive overview of macroeconomic forecasting. The focus is first on a wide range of theories as well as empirical methods: business cycle analysis, time series methods, macroeconomic models, medium and long-run projections, fiscal and financial forecasts, and sectoral forecasting.

Download or read book Forecasts in Times of Crises written by Theo S. Eicher and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, efficiency, and information content to find that IMF forecasts add substantial informational value as they consistently outperform naive forecast approaches. However, we also document that there is room for improvement: two thirds of the key macroeconomic variables that we examine are forecast inefficiently and 6 variables (growth of nominal GDP, public investment, private investment, the current account, net transfers, and government expenditures) exhibit significant forecast bias. Forecasts for low-income countries are the main drivers of forecast bias and inefficiency, reflecting perhaps larger shocks and lower data quality. When we decompose the forecast errors into their sources, we find that forecast errors for private consumption growth are the key contributor to GDP growth forecast errors. Similarly, forecast errors for non-interest expenditure growth and tax revenue growth are crucial determinants of the forecast errors in the growth of fiscal budgets. Forecast errors for balance of payments growth are significantly influenced by forecast errors in goods import growth. The results highlight which macroeconomic aggregates require further attention in future forecast models for countries in crises.

Download or read book Introduction to Financial Forecasting in Investment Analysis written by John B. Guerard, Jr. and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-01-04 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forecasting—the art and science of predicting future outcomes—has become a crucial skill in business and economic analysis. This volume introduces the reader to the tools, methods, and techniques of forecasting, specifically as they apply to financial and investing decisions. With an emphasis on "earnings per share" (eps), the author presents a data-oriented text on financial forecasting, understanding financial data, assessing firm financial strategies (such as share buybacks and R&D spending), creating efficient portfolios, and hedging stock portfolios with financial futures. The opening chapters explain how to understand economic fluctuations and how the stock market leads the general economic trend; introduce the concept of portfolio construction and how movements in the economy influence stock price movements; and introduce the reader to the forecasting process, including exponential smoothing and time series model estimations. Subsequent chapters examine the composite index of leading economic indicators (LEI); review financial statement analysis and mean-variance efficient portfolios; and assess the effectiveness of analysts’ earnings forecasts. Using data from such firms as Intel, General Electric, and Hitachi, Guerard demonstrates how forecasting tools can be applied to understand the business cycle, evaluate market risk, and demonstrate the impact of global stock selection modeling and portfolio construction.

Download or read book Handbook of Economic Forecasting written by Graham Elliott and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2013-08-23 with total page 667 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highly prized ability to make financial plans with some certainty about the future comes from the core fields of economics. In recent years the availability of more data, analytical tools of greater precision, and ex post studies of business decisions have increased demand for information about economic forecasting. Volumes 2A and 2B, which follows Nobel laureate Clive Granger's Volume 1 (2006), concentrate on two major subjects. Volume 2A covers innovations in methodologies, specifically macroforecasting and forecasting financial variables. Volume 2B investigates commercial applications, with sections on forecasters' objectives and methodologies. Experts provide surveys of a large range of literature scattered across applied and theoretical statistics journals as well as econometrics and empirical economics journals. The Handbook of Economic Forecasting Volumes 2A and 2B provide a unique compilation of chapters giving a coherent overview of forecasting theory and applications in one place and with up-to-date accounts of all major conceptual issues. - Focuses on innovation in economic forecasting via industry applications - Presents coherent summaries of subjects in economic forecasting that stretch from methodologies to applications - Makes details about economic forecasting accessible to scholars in fields outside economics