Evaluating real-time VAR forecasts with an informative democratic prior

This paper proposes Bayesian forecasting in a vector autoregression using a democratic prior. This prior is chosen to match the predictions of survey respondents. In particular, the unconditional mean for each series in the vector autoregression is centered around long-horizon survey forecasts. Heavy shrinkage toward the democratic prior is found to give good real-time predictions of a range of macroeconomic variables, as these survey projections are good at quickly capturing endpoint shifts.