Forecasting Inflation with Fundamentals . . . It’s Hard!
Jan Groen Controlling inflation is at the core of monetary policymaking, and central bankers would like to have access to reliable inflation forecasts to assess their progress in achieving this goal. Producing accurate inflation forecasts, however, turns out not to be a trivial exercise. This posts reviews the key challenges in inflation forecasting and discusses […]
The FRBNY DSGE Model Forecast
The U.S. economy has been in a gradual but slow recovery. Will the future be more of the same?
An Assessment of the FRBNY DSGE Model’s Real‑Time Forecasts, 2010‑13
The previous post in this series showed how the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s DSGE model can be used to provide an interpretation of the Great Recession and the slow recovery.
Forecasting with the FRBNY DSGE Model
The term DSGE, which stands for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium, encompasses a very broad class of macro models, from the standard real business cycle (RBC) model of Nobel prizewinners Kydland and Prescott to New Keynesian monetary models like the one of Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans.
The Great Moderation, Forecast Uncertainty, and the Great Recession
The Great Recession of 2007-09 was a dramatic macroeconomic event, marked by a severe contraction in economic activity and a significant fall in inflation.
Forecasting the Great Recession: DSGE vs. Blue Chip
Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have been trashed, bashed, and abused during the Great Recession and after.
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.
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.
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.
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.