A Neural Network-VAR for Long-Term Forecasting: An Application to Monetary Policy Effects in the Euro Area

We propose a hybrid approach that combines Neural Networks with a Vector Autoregression (VAR) model to generate long-term forecasts of time series. We apply this methodology to forecast the impact of shifts in monetary policies within the Euro area on a comprehensive set of macroeconomic variables. Our analysis begins with a standard (linear) VAR model, which is then enhanced by incorporating Neural Networks to generate long-term forecasts for key variables such as the interest rate, inflation, real output, narrow money, exchange rate, and corporate bond spread. The results suggest that a Neural Network-VAR model offers improvements over the traditional linear VAR for forecasting certain macroeconomic variables in the long run. However, due to the limited sample size, the nonlinear model does not consistently outperform the linear VAR.