Economic forecasting: editors’ introduction

Excerpt

This special issue of Empirical Economics contains, with some exceptions, papers presented at the First Vienna Workshop on Economic Forecasting that took place at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna in February 2018. The 2-day workshop, organized by Robert M. Kunst and Martin Wagner, drew much more attention than originally expected. This reflects the increased—respectively regained—importance of forecasting not only in practical terms but also as a research topic in the underlying scientific disciplines. Much of this growing interest may be also rooted in increased importance of forecasting in fields such as management science, marketing or supply chain management and may well be driven by methodological developments rooted in several disciplines that could be summarized under labels such as big data, machine learning and the like; the workshop itself had a narrower focus on macroeconomic forecasting. Even with the specific focus on macroeconomics, the papers span a wide portfolio of approaches and applications, ranging from statistical theory to data-driven research. As indicated in the beginning, some of the contributions in this special volume are not related to the workshop, as submission of manuscripts was open. …