Little attention has been devoted to explaining the failure to predict the turning points at the beginning of recessions. This note builds on a model that showed that a turning point might not be predicted if forecasters' prior probabilities of a recession were low. Costs associated with various...

Forecasts for the current year that are made sometime during the current year are not true annual forecasts because they include already known information for the early part of the year. The current methodology that evaluates these 'forecasts' does not take into account the known information....