Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2007
We study the properties of the multi-period-ahead least-squares forecast for the stationary AR(1) model under a general error distribution. We find that the forecast is unbiased up to O(T−1), where T is the in-sample size, regardless of the error distribution and that the mean squared forecast error, up to O(T−3/2), is robust against nonnormality.The author is grateful to the co-editor Paolo Paruolo and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. The author is solely responsible for any remaining errors.