Housing's role in a recovery

Housing tends to contribute significantly to an economic recovery.Housing - Finance ; Economic conditions

Should food be excluded from core CPI?

The greater a component’s SNR, the more useful the component should be in forecasting headline CPI.Consumer price indexes ; Food prices

How accurate are forecasts in a recession?

Recessions ; Economic forecasting

Using stock market liquidity to forecast recessions

Market participants rebalance their portfolios in advance of a recession.Recessions ; Economic indicators

Uncertainty about when the Fed will raise interest rates

It's hard to make a firm prediction as to when the Fed will raise interest rates.Interest rates ; Monetary policy - United States

Tests of equal forecast accuracy for overlapping models

This paper examines the asymptotic and finite-sample properties of tests of equal forecast accuracy when the models being compared are overlapping in the sense of Vuong (1989). Two models are overlapping when the true model contains just a subset of variables common to the larger sets of variables included in the competing forecasting models. We consider an out-of-sample version of the two-step testing procedure recommended by Vuong but also show that an exact one-step procedure is sometimes applicable. When the models are overlapping, we provide a simple-to-use fixed regressor wild bootstrap that can be used to conduct valid inference. Monte Carlo simulations generally support the theoretical results: the two-step procedure is conservative while the one-step procedure can be accurately sized when appropriate. We conclude with an empirical application comparing the predictive content of credit spreads to growth in real stock prices for forecasting U.S. real GDP growth.Forecasting

Advances in forecast evaluation

This paper surveys recent developments in the evaluation of point forecasts. Taking West’s (2006) survey as a starting point, we briefly cover the state of the literature as of the time of West’s writing. We then focus on recent developments, including advancements in the evaluation of forecasts at the population level (based on true, unknown model coefficients), the evaluation of forecasts in the finite sample (based on estimated model coefficients), and the evaluation of conditional versus unconditional forecasts. We present original results in a few subject areas: the optimization of power in determining the split of a sample into in-sample and out-of-sample portions; whether the accuracy of inference in evaluation of multistep forecasts can be improved with the judicious choice of HAC estimator (it can); and the extension of West’s (1996) theory results for population-level, unconditional forecast evaluation to the case of conditional forecast evaluation.Forecasting ; Time-series analysis

Forecasting of small macroeconomic VARs in the presence of instabilities

Small-scale VARs have come to be widely used in macroeconomics, for purposes ranging from forecasting output, prices, and interest rates to modeling expectations formation in theoretical models. However, a body of recent work suggests such VAR models may be prone to instabilities. In the face of such instabilities, a variety of estimation or forecasting methods might be used to improve the accuracy of forecasts from a VAR. These methods include using different approaches to lag selection, observation windows for estimation, (over-) differencing, intercept correction, stochastically time--varying parameters, break dating, discounted least squares, Bayesian shrinkage, detrending of inflation and interest rates, and model averaging. Focusing on simple models of U.S. output, prices, and interest rates, this paper compares the effectiveness of such methods. Our goal is to identify those approaches that, in real time, yield the most accurate forecasts of these variables. We use forecasts from simple univariate time series models, the Survey of Professional Forecasters and the Federal Reserve Board's Greenbook as benchmarks.Economic forecasting ; Time-series analysis ; Real-time data

Combining forecasts from nested models

Motivated by the common finding that linear autoregressive models forecast better than models that incorporate additional information, this paper presents analytical, Monte Carlo, and empirical evidence on the effectiveness of combining forecasts from nested models. In our analytics, the unrestricted model is true, but as the sample size grows, the DGP converges to the restricted model. This approach captures the practical reality that the predictive content of variables of interest is often low. We derive MSE-minimizing weights for combining the restricted and unrestricted forecasts. In the Monte Carlo and empirical analysis, we compare the effectiveness of our combination approach against related alternatives, such as Bayesian estimation.Forecasting