Central banks' projections-i.e. forecasts conditional on a given interest rate path-are often criticized on the grounds that their underlying policy assumptions are inconsistent with the existence of a unique equilibrium in many forward-looking models. Here I describe three alternative...

Are structural models getting closer to being able to forecast exchange rates at short horizons? Here we argue that misinterpretation of some new out-of-sample tests for nested models, over-reliance on asymptotic test statistics, and failure to sufficiently check robustness to alternative time...

Does the yield curve's ability to predict future output and recessions differ when interest rates are low, as in the current global environment? In this paper we build on recent econometric work by Shi, Phillips and Hurn that detects changes in the causal impact of the yield curve and relate...

How real interest rates behave over time is critical to our understanding of many macroeconomic issues, and much recent research has pursued this question. Very little of the research, however, has focused on real interest rates outside the United States. This paper is an empirical exploration...

Forecasting using `diffusion indices' has received a good deal of attention in recent years. The idea is to use the common factors estimated from a large panel of data to help forecast the series of interest. This paper assesses the extent to which the forecasts are influenced by (i) how the...

Do investors pay enough attention to long-term fundamentals? We consider the case of demographic information. Cohort size fluctuations produce forecastable demand changes for age-sensitive sectors, such as toys, bicycles, beer, life insurance, and nursing homes. These demand changes are...

Despite the clear success of forecast combination in many economic environments, several important issues remain incompletely resolved. The issues relate to selection of the set of forecasts to combine, and whether some form of additional regularization (e.g., shrinkage) is desirable. Against...

In line with Keynes' intuition, volatility in the stock market and in real economic activity are linked by expectations of long term profits. We show that analysts' optimism about the long term earnings growth of S&P 500 firms is associated with a near term boom in major US financial markets,...

This paper examines the extent to which changes in working-age shares associated with population aging might slow economic growth in upcoming years. We first analyze the economic effects of changing working-age shares in a standard empirical growth model using country panel data from 1950-2015....