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Testing Quantile Forecast Optimality

Fosten, J., Gutknecht, D. & Pohle, M-O. (2024). Testing Quantile Forecast Optimality. Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, doi: 10.1080/07350015.2024.2316091

Abstract

Quantile forecasts made across multiple horizons have become an important output of many financial institutions, central banks and international organizations. This article proposes misspecification tests for such quantile forecasts that assess optimality over a set of multiple forecast horizons and/or quantiles. The tests build on multiple Mincer-Zarnowitz quantile regressions cast in a moment equality framework. Our main test is for the null hypothesis of autocalibration, a concept which assesses optimality with respect to the information contained in the forecasts themselves. We provide an extension that allows to test for optimality with respect to larger information sets and a multivariate extension. Importantly, our tests do not just inform about general violations of optimality, but may also provide useful insights into specific forms of sub-optimality. A simulation study investigates the finite sample performance of our tests, and two empirical applications to financial returns and U.S. macroeconomic series illustrate that our tests can yield interesting insights into quantile forecast sub-optimality and its causes.

Publication Type: Article
Additional Information: © 2024 The Authors. Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Publisher Keywords: Forecast evaluation, Forecast rationality, Multiple horizons, Quantile regression
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
H Social Sciences > HG Finance
Departments: Bayes Business School
Bayes Business School > Finance
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