Are Macroeconomic Variables Useful for Forecasting the Distribution of U.S. Inflation?

Much of the US inflation forecasting literature deals with examining the ability of macroeconomic indicators to predict the mean of future inflation, and the overwhelming evidence suggests that the macroeconomic indicators provide little or no predictability. In this paper, we expand the scope of inflation predictability and explore whether macroeconomic indicators are useful in predicting the distribution of future inflation. To incorporate macroeconomic indicators into the prediction of the conditional distribution of future inflation, we introduce a semi-parametric approach using conditional quantiles. The approach offers more flexibility in capturing the possible role of macroeconomic indicators in predicting the different parts of the future inflation distribution. Using monthly data on US inflation, we find that unemployment rate, housing starts, and the term spread provide significant out-of-sample predictability for the distribution of core inflation. Importantly, this result is obtained for a forecast evaluation period that we intentionally chose to be after 1984, when current research shows that macroeconomic indicators do not add much to the predictability of the future mean inflation. This paper discusses various findings using forecast intervals and forecast densities, and highlights the unique insights that the distribution approach offers, which otherwise would be ignored if we relied only on mean forecasts.Conditional quantiles; Distribution; Inflation; Predictability; Phillips curve; Combining

A Semiparametric Analysis of Gasoline Demand in the US: Reexamining The Impact of Price

The evaluation of the impact of an increase in gasoline tax on demand relies crucially on the estimate of the price elasticity. This paper presents an extended application of the Partially Linear Additive Model (PLAM) to the analysis of gasoline demand using a panel of US households, focusing mainly on the estimation of the price elasticity. Unlike previous semi-parametric studies that use household-level data, we work with vehicle-level data within households that can potentially add richer details to the price variable. Both households and vehicles data are obtained from the Residential Transportation Energy Consumption Survey (RTECS) of 1991 and 1994, conducted by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). As expected, the derived vehicle-based gasoline price has significant dispersion across the country and across grades of gasoline. By using a PLAM specification for gasoline demand, we obtain a measure of gasoline price elasticity that circumvents the implausible price effects reported in earlier studies. In particular, our results show the price elasticity ranges between −0.2, at low prices, and −0.5, at high prices, suggesting that households might respond differently to price changes depending on the level of price. In addition, we estimate separately the model to households that buy only regular gasoline and those that buy also midgrade/premium gasoline. The results show that the price elasticities for these groups are increasing in price and that regular households are more price sensitive compared to non-regular.semiparametric methods; partially linear additive model; gasoline demand

Does liquidity in the FX market depend on volatility?

We re-examine the relationship between exchange rates and order flow as proposed by Evans and Lyons (2002). Compared to their linear specification, we find that the response of exchange rates to order flow may depend on market historical volatility. If market historical volatility is high, a given order seems to have a lower price impact than in calmer periods. Overall, our simple threshold mechanism has the power to produce higher correlation coefficients.exchange rate dynamics

Testing for Nonlinear Structure and Chaos in Economic Time. A Comment.

This short paper is a comment on ``Testing for Nonlinear Structure and Chaos in Economic Time Series'' by Catherine Kyrtsou and Apostolos Serletis. We summarize their main results and discuss some of their conclusions concerning the role of outliers and noisy chaos. In particular, we include some new simulations to investigate whether economic time series may be characterized by low dimensional noisy chaos

Forecasting GDP in Europe with Textual Data

We evaluate the informational content of news-based sentiment indicators for forecasting Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other macroeconomic variables of the five major European economies. Our data set includes over 27 million articles for 26 major newspapers in 5 different languages. The evidence indicates that these sentiment indicators are significant predictors to forecast macroeconomic variables and their predictive content is robust to controlling for other indicators available to forecasters in real-time.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures, published in Journal of Applied Econometrics (Early view

Forecasting Loan Default in Europe with Machine Learning

We use a dataset of 12 million residential mortgages to investigate the loan default behavior in several European countries. We model the default occurrence as a function of borrower characteristics, loan-specific variables, and local economic conditions. We compare the performance of a set of machine learning algorithms relative to the logistic regression, finding that they perform significantly better in providing predictions. The most important variables in explaining loan default are the interest rate and the local economic characteristics. The existence of relevant geographical heterogeneity in the variable importance points at the need for regionally tailored risk-assessment policies in Europe

Are Macroeconomic Variables Useful for Forecasting the Distribution of U.S. Inflation?

Much of the US inflation forecasting literature deals with examining the ability of macroeconomic indicators to predict the mean of future inflation, and the overwhelming evidence suggests that the macroeconomic indicators provide little or no predictability. In this paper, we expand the scope of inflation predictability and explore whether macroeconomic indicators are useful in predicting the distribution of future inflation. To incorporate macroeconomic indicators into the prediction of the conditional distribution of future inflation, we introduce a semi-parametric approach using conditional quantiles. The approach offers more flexibility in capturing the possible role of macroeconomic indicators in predicting the different parts of the future inflation distribution. Using monthly data on US inflation, we find that unemployment rate, housing starts, and the term spread provide significant out-of-sample predictability for the distribution of core inflation. Importantly, this result is obtained for a forecast evaluation period that we intentionally chose to be after 1984, when current research shows that macroeconomic indicators do not add much to the predictability of the future mean inflation. This paper discusses various findings using forecast intervals and forecast densities, and highlights the unique insights that the distribution approach offers, which otherwise would be ignored if we relied only on mean forecasts

A Semiparametric Analysis of Gasoline Demand in the US: Reexamining The Impact of Price

The evaluation of the impact of an increase in gasoline tax on demand relies crucially on the estimate of the price elasticity. This paper presents an extended application of the Partially Linear Additive Model (PLAM) to the analysis of gasoline demand using a panel of US households, focusing mainly on the estimation of the price elasticity. Unlike previous semi-parametric studies that use household-level data, we work with vehicle-level data within households that can potentially add richer details to the price variable. Both households and vehicles data are obtained from the Residential Transportation Energy Consumption Survey (RTECS) of 1991 and 1994, conducted by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). As expected, the derived vehicle-based gasoline price has significant dispersion across the country and across grades of gasoline. By using a PLAM specification for gasoline demand, we obtain a measure of gasoline price elasticity that circumvents the implausible price effects reported in earlier studies. In particular, our results show the price elasticity ranges between −0.2, at low prices, and −0.5, at high prices, suggesting that households might respond differently to price changes depending on the level of price. In addition, we estimate separately the model to households that buy only regular gasoline and those that buy also midgrade/premium gasoline. The results show that the price elasticities for these groups are increasing in price and that regular households are more price sensitive compared to non-regular

A Semiparametric Analysis of Gasoline Demand in the US: Reexamining The Impact of Price

The evaluation of the impact of an increase in gasoline tax on demand relies crucially on the estimate of the price elasticity. This paper presents an extended application of the Partially Linear Additive Model (PLAM) to the analysis of gasoline demand using a panel of US households, focusing mainly on the estimation of the price elasticity. Unlike previous semi-parametric studies that use household-level data, we work with vehicle-level data within households that can potentially add richer details to the price variable. Both households and vehicles data are obtained from the Residential Transportation Energy Consumption Survey (RTECS) of 1991 and 1994, conducted by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). As expected, the derived vehicle-based gasoline price has significant dispersion across the country and across grades of gasoline. By using a PLAM specification for gasoline demand, we obtain a measure of gasoline price elasticity that circumvents the implausible price effects reported in earlier studies. In particular, our results show the price elasticity ranges between −0.2, at low prices, and −0.5, at high prices, suggesting that households might respond differently to price changes depending on the level of price. In addition, we estimate separately the model to households that buy only regular gasoline and those that buy also midgrade/premium gasoline. The results show that the price elasticities for these groups are increasing in price and that regular households are more price sensitive compared to non-regular

Are Macroeconomic Variables Useful for Forecasting the Distribution of U.S. Inflation?

Much of the US inflation forecasting literature deals with examining the ability of macroeconomic indicators to predict the mean of future inflation, and the overwhelming evidence suggests that the macroeconomic indicators provide little or no predictability. In this paper, we expand the scope of inflation predictability and explore whether macroeconomic indicators are useful in predicting the distribution of future inflation. To incorporate macroeconomic indicators into the prediction of the conditional distribution of future inflation, we introduce a semi-parametric approach using conditional quantiles. The approach offers more flexibility in capturing the possible role of macroeconomic indicators in predicting the different parts of the future inflation distribution. Using monthly data on US inflation, we find that unemployment rate, housing starts, and the term spread provide significant out-of-sample predictability for the distribution of core inflation. Importantly, this result is obtained for a forecast evaluation period that we intentionally chose to be after 1984, when current research shows that macroeconomic indicators do not add much to the predictability of the future mean inflation. This paper discusses various findings using forecast intervals and forecast densities, and highlights the unique insights that the distribution approach offers, which otherwise would be ignored if we relied only on mean forecasts