This paper looks at the term-structure literature to identify early signs predicting recessionary patterns in the U.S. and other developed economies. Based on the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) recession dates, we define the probability...

Ongoing economic globalization makes real-time international data increasingly relevant, though little work has been done on collecting and analyzing real-time data for economies other than the U.S. In this paper, we introduce and examine a new international real-time dataset assembled from...

Using a recently developed econometric technique to determine how the original Taylor rule and subsequent variations perform using different measures of inflation, output and unemployment. We found that the rule remains relevant today, despite the changes wrought by globalization, financial...

We look at how well several alternative Taylor rule specifications describe Federal Reserve policy decisions in real time, using the newly developed Giacomini and Rossi (2007) test for non-nested model selection in the presence of (possible) parameter instability. Further, we isolate those...

A growing body of empirical macroeconomic literature suggests that analyses using real-time data often yield substantially different—and more accurate—conclusions.

This paper examines the impact of Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (CAAA) environmental regulations on U.S. motor gasoline import patterns. Following the damage to U.S. petroleum refining infrastructure from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the federal government provided temporary relief for...

Estimating the effect of trade on capital flows is difficult given the inherent identification problem. We use fluctuations in rainfall to capture the exogenous variation in trade between Germany, France, the U.K., and the Ottoman Empire during 1859-1913. The provisionistic policy of the Ottoman...