Search Results
Working Paper
Forecast Combination for Euro Area Inflation - A Cure in Times of Crisis?
The period of extraordinary volatility in euro area headline inflation starting in 2007 raised the question whether forecast combination methods can be used to hedge against bad forecast performance of single models during such periods and provide more robust forecasts. We investigate this issue for forecasts from a range of short-term forecasting models. Our analysis shows that there is considerable variation of the relative performance of the different models over time. To take that into account we suggest employing performance-based forecast combination methods, in particular one with more ...
Working Paper
On the Aggregation of Probability Assessments: Regularized Mixtures of Predictive Densities for Eurozone Inflation and Real Interest Rates
We propose methods for constructing regularized mixtures of density forecasts. We explore a variety of objectives and regularization penalties, and we use them in a substantive exploration of Eurozone inflation and real interest rate density forecasts. All individual inflation forecasters (even the ex post best forecaster) are outperformed by our regularized mixtures. From the Great Recession onward, the optimal regularization tends to move density forecasts’ probability mass from the centers to the tails, correcting for overconfidence.