A major shortcoming of the U.S. leading index is that it does not use the most recent information for stock prices and yield spreads. The index methodology ignores these data in favor of a time-consistent set of components (i.e., all of the components must refer to the previous month). An...

Financial indicators such as yield curves and stock prices have been extensively used as leading indicators of economic activity due to their forward looking content. Indeed, the Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States, a widely used forecasting tool for business cycle turning points,...

Long business expansions have repeatedly generated expectations of self- perpetuating prosperity, yet it is clear that such popular forecasts always proved wrong eventually. Few business cycle peaks are successfully predicted; indeed, most are publicly recognized only with lengty delays. Analysts...

Have macroeconomic forecasts grown more or less accurate over time? This paper assembles, examines, and interprets evidence bearing on this question. Contrary to some critics, there are no indications that U.S. forecasts have grown systematically worse, that is, less accurate, more biased, or...

What is the role of foresight, and the significance of the lack of foresight under uncertainty, in the theory of business cycles ? What relevant evidence on these questions can be extracted from the survey data on agents' expectations and experts' forecasts? To provide some answers, the recent...

This paper reports on a comprehensive study of the distributions of summary measures of error for a large collection of quarterly multiperiod predictions of six variables representing inflation, real qrowth, unemployment,and percentage changes in nominal GNP and two of its more volatile...

Each quarter since 1968 the National Bureau of Economic Research, in collaboration with the American Statistical Association, has been collecting a large amount of information on the record of forecasting in the U. S. economy. This paper is a progress report on a comprehensive study of the...

The aim of this study is to contribute to the measurement and analysis of errors in economists' predictions of changes in aggregate income, output, and the price level. Small sample studies of forecasts can be instructive, but their limitations must be recognized. Compilation of consistent...

The answer to this question depends on the treatment of logically and empirically prior questions about (1) what the forecasts are and why they are needed, and (2) what can reasonably be expected of them. Further, what forecasters can and should do cannot be established without studying the...

The targeted deficit reductions of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings (GRH) law are to be temporarily suspended in case of an official determination that real economic growth either (a) has been less than one percent in the two most recent reported quarters, or (b) is projected to be less than zero in...