Forecasting with Julia

Abhi Gupta, Pearl Li, Erica Moszkowski, Marco Del Negro, and Marc Giannoni

A little more than a year ago, in this post, we announced DSGE.jl—a package for working with dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models using Julia, the open-source computing language. At that time, DSGE.jl contained only the code required to specify, solve, and estimate such models using Bayesian methods. Now, we have extended the package to provide the additional code needed to produce economic forecasts, counterfactual simulations, and inference on unobservable variables, such as the natural rate of interest or the output gap. The old, pre-Julia version of the code, which was written in MATLAB and is posted here on Github, a public repository hosting service, also performed some of these functions, but not quite as fast.

Just Released: The New York Fed Staff Forecast—April 2017

Jonathan McCarthy, Richard Peach, and Robert Rich

Today, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) is hosting the spring meeting of its Economic Advisory Panel (EAP). As has become the custom at this meeting, the FRBNY staff is presenting its forecast for U.S. real GDP growth, the unemployment rate, and inflation. Following the presentation, members of the EAP, which consists of leading economists in academia and the private sector, are asked to critique the staff forecast. Such feedback helps the staff evaluate the assumptions and reasoning underlying its forecast as well as the forecast’s key risks. The feedback is also an important part of the forecasting process because it informs the staff’s discussions with New York Fed President William Dudley about economic conditions. In that same spirit, we are sharing a summary of the staff forecast in this post. For more detail, see the FRBNY Staff Outlook Presentation from the EAP meeting on our website.

From the Vault: Factor This In

Anna Snider

In May 2014, Liberty Street Economics bloggers shared a new approach for calculating the Treasury term premium as well as a link for downloading their estimates of it. It has been gratifying to see the “ACM” model (named for current and former New York Fed economists Tobias Adrian, Richard Crump, and Emanuel Moench) make eye-catching headlines, and become “increasingly canonical,” as one reporter described it.

The FRBNY DSGE Model Forecast—February 2017

Marco Del Negro, Marc Giannoni, Abhi Gupta, Pearl Li, and Erica Moszkowski

This post presents the latest update of the economic forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s (FRBNY) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We introduced this model in a series of blog posts in September 2014 and published forecasts twice a year thereafter. With this post, we move to a quarterly release schedule, and highlight how our forecasts have changed since November 2016.

The FRBNY DSGE Model Forecast—November 2016

Marco Del Negro, Marc Giannoni, Abhi Gupta, Pearl Li, and Erica Moszkowski

This post presents the latest update of the economic forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s (FRBNY) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We introduced this model in a series of blog posts in September 2014 and have since published forecasts twice a year. Here we describe our current forecast and highlight how it has changed since May 2016.

Just Released: Press Briefing on the Survey of Consumer Expectations

Olivier Armantier, Giorgio Topa, Wilbert van der Klaauw, and Basit Zafar



The New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) collects information on household heads’ economic expectations and behavior. In particular, the survey covers respondents’ views on how inflation, spending, credit access, and the housing and labor markets will evolve over time. The SCE yields important insights that inform our monetary policy decisions. This morning, President Dudley joined New York Fed economists to brief the press on the design of the SCE and the latest releases of survey results. President Dudley introduced the briefing by speaking about the benefits of measuring consumers’ expectations.

Inflation and Japan’s Ever-Tightening Labor Market

Bianca De Paoli, Thomas Klitgaard, and Harry Wheeler



Japan offers a preview of future U.S. demographic trends, having already seen a large increase in the population over 65. So, how has the Japanese economy dealt with this change? A look at the data shows that women of all ages have been pulled into the labor force and that more people are working longer. This transformation of the work force has not been enough to prevent a very tight labor market in a slowly growing economy, and it may help explain why inflation remains minimal. Namely, wages are not responding as much as they might to the tight labor market because women and older workers tend to have lower bargaining power than prime-age males.

From the Vault: Does Forward Guidance Work?

Anna Snider

In recent months, there have been some high-profile assessments of how far the Federal Reserve has come in terms of communicating about monetary policy since its “secrets of the temple” days. While observers say the transition to greater transparency “still seems to be a work in progress,” they note the range of steps the Fed has taken over the years to shed light on its strategy, including issuing statements to announce and explain policy changes following Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings, post-meeting press conferences and minutes, FOMC-member speeches and testimony, and “forward guidance” in all its variants.

What Drives Forecaster Disagreement about Monetary Policy?

Richard Crump and Stefano Eusepi



What can disagreement teach us about how private forecasters perceive the conduct of monetary policy? In a previous post, we showed that private forecasters disagree about both the short-term and the long-term evolution of key macroeconomic variables but that the shape of this disagreement differs across variables. In contrast to their views on other macroeconomic variables, private forecasters disagree substantially about the level of the federal funds rate that will prevail in the medium to long term but very little on the rate at shorter horizons. In this post, we explore the possible explanations for what drives forecasts of the federal funds rate, especially in the longer run.

Restoring Economic Growth in Puerto Rico: Introduction to the Series

Hunter Clark, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Andrew Haughwout




The difficult economic and financial issues facing the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico have remained very much in the news since our post on options for addressing its fiscal problems appeared last fall. That post was itself a follow-up on a series of analyses, starting with a 2012 report that detailed the economic challenges facing the Commonwealth. In 2014, we extended that analysis with an update where we focused more closely on the fiscal challenges facing the Island. As the problems deepened, we have continued to examine important related subjects ranging from positive revisions in employment data, to the credit conditions faced by small businesses, to understanding emigration, and to considering how the Commonwealth’s public debts stack up. In most of this work, we have focused on how policymakers could help to address the immediate issues facing the Island and its people. The U.S. Congress and the Obama Administration took action in June to provide a framework to help address Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis. But much remains to be done to address these ongoing problems, which represent a significant impediment to economic growth in the short run. It also seems important to revisit the question of the prospects for reviving longer-run growth in the Commonwealth. These concerns were underscored by projections published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the April edition of the World Economic Outlook that forecast Puerto Rico’s real GDP and population to decline through 2021.