The common approach to evaluating a model in the structural VAR literature is to compare the impulse responses from structural VARs run on the data to the theoretical impulse responses from the model. The Sims-Cogley-Nason approach instead compares the structural VARs run on the data to...

We propose a simple cross-sectional technique to extract daily factors from economic news released at different times and frequencies. Our approach can effectively handle the large number of different announcements that are relevant for tracking current economic conditions. We apply the...

The central finding of the recent structural vector autoregression (SVAR) literature with a differenced specification of hours is that technology shocks lead to a fall in hours. Researchers have used this finding to argue that real business cycle models are unpromising. We subject this SVAR...

We provide a novel methodology for estimating time-varying weights in linear prediction pools, which we call Dynamic Pools, and use it to investigate the relative forecasting performance of DSGE models with and without financial frictions for output growth and inflation from 1992 to 2011. We...

Standard practice for the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models maintains the assumption that economic variables are properly measured by a single indicator, and that all relevant information for the estimation is summarized by a small number of data series. However,...

Many recent papers have found that atheoretical forecasting methods using many predictors give better predictions for key macroeconomic variables than various small-model methods. The practical relevance of these results is open to question, however, because these papers generally use ex post...

This paper considers a moments based non-linear estimator that is root-T consistent and uniformly asymptotically normal irrespective of the degree of persistence of the forcing process. These properties hold for linear autoregressive models, linear predictive regressions, as well as certain...

A central challenge in the measurement of entrepreneurship is accounting for the wide variation in entrepreneurial quality across firms. This paper develops a new approach for estimating entrepreneurial quality by linking the probability of a growth outcome (e.g., achieving an IPO or a...

This paper develops and illustrates a simple method to generate a DSGE model-based forecast for variables that do not explicitly appear in the model (non-core variables). We use auxiliary regressions that resemble measurement equations in a dynamic factor model to link the non-core variables to...

Forecasts for the two or three years after mid-2014 have converged on growth rates of real GDP in the range of 3.0 to 3.5 percent, a major stepwise increase from realized growth of 2.1 percent between mid-2009 and mid-2014. However, these forecasts are based on the demand for goods and services....