Agustín Maravall: An interview with the International Journal of Forecasting Articles uri icon

publication date

  • January 2020

issue

  • 4

volume

  • 36

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0169-2070

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1872-8200

abstract

  • (copyright) 2019 International Institute of ForecastersAgust¿ Maravall Herrero (Madrid, 1944) is one of the world's authorities in seasonal adjustment and automatic forecasting of economic time series. He studied Agricultural Engineering and completed a doctorate at the Universidad Polit¿nica de Madrid. With a Ford-Fulbright fellowship he moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to obtain a Ph.D. in Economics in 1975. He worked at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (the Fed) in Washington D.C. and in 1979 returned to Madrid as a Senior Economist in the Research Department of the Banco de Espa¿ (BE). In the period 1989-96, he was a full professor in the Department of Economics of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He returned to the BE as Chief Economist and Head of the Time Series Analysis Unit and retired in December 2014. Maravall has done outstanding research in time series and has been a pioneer in developing methodology and writing computer programs for automatic estimation and model selection, seasonal adjustment, and forecasting of time series. His programs 'Time Series Regression with ARIMA noise, Missing observations and Outliers' (TRAMO) and 'Signal Extraction in ARIMA Time Series' (SEATS), jointly developed with Victor G¿ez, have had a large influence in applied forecasting, including adjusting series for seasonality and possibly other undesirable effects, such as outliers, or missing observations, and have been used in many economic institutions around the world. [...]

keywords

  • automatic computer programs; economic forecasting; regression arima models; seasonal adjustment; time series; trend and cycle