Central Bank Workshop on Macroeconomic Modelling
October 9th-10th, 2008
Cartagena de Indias, Colombia
Organized by the Banco de la República de Colombia

Keynote speakers
Fabio Canova 
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Douglas Laxton
International Monetary Fund

In the past five years, central banks have devoted considerable effort to building general equilibrium models that can be used as policy analysis tools and also to help understand the links between money, inflation and business cycle fluctuations. In order to be useful for policy making, such models should be capable of making accurate forecasts of the macroeconomic data. However, their forecasting performance depends not only on the model structure and its calibration and estimation, but also on the data. The challenge to policy makers is therefore to learn how to evaluate and improve the forecasting performance in the presence of data uncertainty.

The Central Bank Workshop on Macroeconomic Modelling will bring together researchers from different central banks and other policy making institutions to discuss recent developments in this area.  We will welcome paper proposals on this theme in the workshop, but give priority to policy-oriented research. Previous workshops were held at Banco Central de Chile and Norges Bank . In 2009 the Central Bank Workshop will be organized by the Bank of Israel. 

The organizers are unfortunately not able to offer financial support for travelling, accommodation and daily expenses. However, the conference costs will be covered by Banco de la República and fee is not required for the workshop participants. 

Submission of an elaborated draft or at a minimum an extended abstract with a comprehensive description of the scope of the paper should be mail to Esta dirección de correo electrónico está protegida contra los robots de spam, necesita tener Javascript activado para poder verla at Banco de la República, by July 31, 2008. Each submitted paper should nominate a corresponding author and include the contact information (name, affiliation, telephone and email address).  Announcements about paper acceptance and the final conference program will be made on August 31, 2008. 

The conference will take place in Cartagena de Indias from 9th to 10th of October 2008 at Hotel Las Americas.

For further information go to: http://www.banrep.gov.co/seminar/i_index_call.html

 Keywords:  Forecasting, Data Uncertainty, DSGE models.