The Contribution of Structural Break Models to Forecasting Macroeconomic Series

This paper compares the forecasting performance of different models which have been proposed for forecasting in the presence of structural breaks. These models differ in their treatment of the break process, the model which applies in each regime and the out- of-sample probability of a break occurring. In an extensive empirical evaluation involving 60 macroeconomic quarterly and monthly time series, we demonstrate the presence of structural breaks and their importance for forecasting in the vast majority of cases. We find no single forecasting model that consistently works best in the presence of structural breaks. In many cases, the formal modeling of the break process is important in achieving good forecast per- formance. However, there are also many cases where simple, rolling window based forecasts perform well.

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