98 posts on "Forecasting"
March 27, 2012
Okun’s Law and Long Expansions
Economic forecasters frequently use a simple rule of thumb called Okun’s law to link their real GDP growth forecasts to their unemployment rate forecasts.
Posted at 7:00 am in Forecasting, Labor Market, Macroeconomics, Unemployment | Permalink | Comments (1)
January 4, 2012
Forecasting with Internet Search Data
Most economic data are released with a lag, sometimes quite a substantial one. Since the advent of regularly scheduled releases of economic data in the 1930s, a key challenge for economists has been to identify indicators that provide timely information about the release before it comes out—effectively, that “now-cast” its content.
Posted at 7:00 am in Exchange Rates, Forecasting, Housing, Regional Analysis, Unemployment | Permalink | Comments (4)
December 28, 2011
Labor Force Exits Are Complicating Unemployment Rate Forecasts
What will the unemployment rate be in 2013? Even if you were certain how much the U.S. economy (gross domestic product, or GDP) would grow over the next year or two, it would still be difficult to forecast the unemployment rate over that period.
Posted at 7:00 am in Forecasting, Labor Market, Macroeconomics, Unemployment | Permalink | Comments (2)
November 25, 2011
The Failure to Forecast the Great Recession
The economics profession has been appropriately criticized for its failure to forecast the large fall in U.S. house prices and its propagation first into an unprecedented financial crisis and subsequently into the Great Recession.
Posted at 6:00 pm in Forecasting, Macroeconomics, Monetary Policy, Recession, Unemployment | Permalink | Comments (30)
September 12, 2011
Can Speculative Trading Magnify Financial Market Co‑movement?
Global financial markets tend to move together. For example, stock market movements across the globe are highly synchronized, economic data releases frequently have large spillover effects across borders, and episodes of financial turmoil often spread across countries that share no significant economic linkages.
August 22, 2011
A Look at the Accuracy of Policy Expectations
Since the 1980s, the primary policy tool of the Federal Reserve has been the federal funds rate. Because expectations of the future path of the funds rate play a central role in the term structure of interest rates and thus the monetary transmission mechanism, it is important to know how accurate these expectations are in predicting the funds rate. In this post, we investigate this issue using a well-known survey of private sector forecasters. We find that forecasts tend to over-predict the funds rate in easing cycles and under-predict it in tightening cycles. In addition, while forecasts during tightening cycles have become more accurate over time, forecast accuracy during easing cycles has not improved.
August 1, 2011
International Spillovers on Government Bond Yields: Are We All in the Same Boat?
Should we expect the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchases since late 2008 to have much impact on bond yields beyond U.S. borders? Prior studies (mostly of particular events, such as Neely [2010]) say yes. They find evidence of cross-country spillovers in the international bond market, but provide little insight into the strength, scope, and dynamics of these spillover effects. In this post, we quantify the international transmission of financial shocks between the U.S. government bond market and three other developed countries, thus providing a benchmark measure of the cross-country spillover effects in the international bond market. We find that an unexpected increase of 1 percent in long-term U.S. bond yields can lead to a 0.14 percent to 0.19 percent rise in the bond yields of other developed countries on impact, and that the cumulative spillover effect from U.S. to foreign bond markets ranges from 0.26 percent to 0.35 percent over a longer horizon.
June 27, 2011
How Easy Is It to Forecast Commodity Prices?
Over the last decade, unprecedented spikes and drops in commodity prices have been a recurrent source of concern to both policymakers and the general public. Given all the recent attention, have economists and analysts made any progress in their ability to predict movements in commodity prices? In this post, we find there is no easy answer. We consider different strategies to forecast near-term commodity price inflation, but find that no particular approach is systematically more accurate and robust. Additionally, the results warn against interpreting current forecasts of commodity prices upswings as reliable and dependable signals of future inflationary pressure.
Posted at 10:00 am in Exchange Rates, Exports, Forecasting, Inflation, International Economics, Macroeconomics | Permalink | Comments (2)
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