An important component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s (ARRA’s) $796 billion proposed stimulus budget was $318 billion in fiscal assistance to state and local governments, yet the authors have no precise estimates of the impact of such assistance on the macroeconomy. In...

The authors sketch a framework for monitoring macroeconomic activity in real-time and push it in new directions. In particular, they focus not only on real activity, which has received most attention to date, but also on inflation and its interaction with real activity. As for the recent...

In economics, common factors are often assumed to underlie the co-movements of a set of macroeconomic variables. For this reason, many authors have used estimated factors in the construction of prediction models. In this paper, we begin by surveying the extant literature on diffusion indexes. We...

In this paper, the authors describe and compare two approaches to analyzing transactions costs in a general equilibrium setting. In the first approach, which the authors label the transactions costs approach, the commodity space is the same as that used in models without transactions costs. In...

This paper describes the existing research (as of February 2008) on real-time data analysis, divided into five areas: (1) data revisions; (2) forecasting; (3) monetary policy analysis; (4) macroeconomic research; and (5) current analysis of business and financial conditions. In each area,...

This paper presents the concept and uses of a real-time data set that can be used by economists for testing the robustness of published econometric results, for analyzing policy, and for forecasting. The data set consists of vintages, or snapshots, of the major macroeconomic data available at...

This paper uses a real-time data set to analyze data revisions and to test the robustness of published econometric results. The data set consists of vintages, or snapshots, of the major macroeconomic data available at quarterly intervals in real time. The paper illustrates why such data may...

This paper reviews Bayesian methods that have been developed in recent years to estimate and evaluate dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. We consider the estimation of linearized DSGE models, the evaluation of models based on Bayesian model checking, posterior odds comparisons,...

This paper presents a real-time data set that can be used by economists for testing the robustness of published econometric results, for analyzing policy, and for forecasting. The data set consists of vintages, or snapshots, of the major macroeconomic data available at quarterly intervals in...