Forecasting and model averaging with structural breaks

This dissertation consists of three chapters. Collectively they attempt to investigateon how to better forecast a time series variable when there is uncertainty on the stabilityof model parameters.The first chapter applies the newly developed theory of optimal and robust weightsto forecasting the U.S. market equity premium in the presence of structural breaks.The empirical results suggest that parameter instability cannot fully explain the weakforecasting performance of most predictors used in related empirical research.The second chapter introduces a two-stage forecast combination method to forecastingthe U.S. market equity premium out-of-sample. In the first stage, for each predictivemodel, we combine its stable and break cases by using several model averaging methods. Next, we pool all adjusted predictive models together by applying equal weights. The empirical results suggest that this new method can potentially offer substantial predictive gains relative to the simple one-stage overall equal weights method.The third chapter extends model averaging theory under uncertainty regarding structuralbreaks to the out-of-sample forecast setting, and proposes new predictive modelweights based on the leave-one-out cross-validation criterion (CV), as CV is robust toheteroscedasticity and can be applied generally. It provides Monte Carlo and empiricalevidence showing that CV weights outperform several competing methods.