An optimal early warning system for currency crises under model uncertainty

Abstract

This paper assesses several early warning (EWS) models of financial crises to propose a model that can predict the incidence of a currency crisis in developing countries. For this purpose, we employ the equal weighting (EW) and dynamic model averaging (DMA) approaches to combine forecast from individual models allowing for time-varying weights. Taking Egypt as a case study and focusing only on currency crises, our findings show that combined forecast (EW- and DMA-based EWS), to account for uncertainty, perform better than other competing models in both in-sample and out-of-sample forecasts.