This paper provides a statistical analysis of the forecasts of a significant number of expenditure and revenue components of the federal budget provided each year by the Department of Finance. The sample available for such an investigation is limited, and the authors describe an easily applied...

As an important initial step in the annual budget process, the President presents to Congress each January his budget with details of federal spending activity and priorities. Our paper is a statistical assessment of the merit of the budget figures submitted to Congress. We investigate the...

The hypothesis that a variable is independent of past information, such as its own past and past realizations of other observable variables, is a frequent implication of economic theory. Yet standard regression-based tests of orthogonality may not have the correct level if there is feedback from...

This paper evaluates the forecast performance of Canadian financial institutions and forecasting firms between 1984 and 2003. The sample period is roughly double that of an earlier study. We divide the sample in two and investigate whether a particular institution has improved its relative...