I would like to share with you some of my thoughts about economic forecasts and monetary policy. I will begin with some comments about the economy's recent performance and the outlook for 2006. Next, I will explain why making sound policy decisions requires me to think about both the demand and...

President Pianalto spoke of her perspective on the economy and inflation. She explained how some critical assumptions affect her economic projections and talked about the role that inflation expectations play in the current environment.

President Pianalto spoke about the Federal Reserve's economic projections and shared her current views on the state of the economy.

In this paper, we present a forecasting technique that uses contemporaneous correlations for forecasting in a time series model when only a subset of the variables are available for the current period. This method potentially provides more accurate forecasts than the standard time series...

The purposes of this study are two: 1) to compare the forecasting abilities of the three methods: univariate autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), multivariate autoregressive integrated moving average (MARIMA), and vector autoregression (both unconstrained — VAR — and Bayesian...

The estimation of large vector autoregressions with stochastic volatility using standard methods is computationally very demanding. In this paper we propose to model conditional volatilities as driven by a single common unobserved factor. This is justified by the observation that the pattern of...

This paper compares alternative models of time-varying macroeconomic volatility on the basis of the accuracy of point and density forecasts of macroeconomic variables. In this analysis, we consider both Bayesian autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive models that incorporate some form...

We estimate the process underlying the pricing of American options by using higher-order lattices combined with a multigrid method. This paper also tests whether the risk-neutral densities given from American options provide a good forecasting tool. We use a nonparametric test of the densities...