Not all of that extra output will remain in the United States. If the trade deficit is reduced by three percent of GDP, the rise in exports and decline in imports will reduce output available for U.S. consumption and investment by about 0.3 percent a year

We examine several measures of uncertainty to make five points. First, equity market traders and executives at nonfinancial firms have shared similar assessments about one-year-ahead uncertainty since the pandemic struck. Both the one-year VIX and our survey-based measure of firm-level...

We resuscitated the mixed-frequency vector autoregression (MF-VAR) developed in Schorfheide and Song (2015, JBES) to generate macroeconomic forecasts for the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic in real time. The model combines eleven time series observed at two frequencies: quarterly and monthly....

This paper proposes a new way of displaying and analyzing macroeconomic time series to form recession forecasts. The proposed data displays contain the last three years of each expansion. These allow observers to see for themselves what is different about the last year before recession. Based on...

This paper shows that foreign term spreads constructed from bond yields of non-U.S. G-7 constituents predict future U.S. recessions and that foreign term spreads are stronger predictors of U.S. recessions occurring within the next year than U.S. term spreads. U.S. and foreign term spreads are...

This paper focuses on the problem of formulating an analysis of economic policy that is consistent with rational expectations. Cooley, LeRoy,and Raymon show that the Lucas and Sargent strategy for econometric policy evaluation is itself vulnerable to the logic of the Lucas critique. The present...

The usual practice in economic forecasting is to report point predictions without specifying the attached probabilities. Periodic surveys of such forecasts produce group averages, which are taken to indicate the "consensus" of experts. Measures of the dispersion of individual forecasts around...

This paper presents extensive results from testing for bias and serially correlated errors in a large collection of quarterly multiperiod predictions from surveys conducted since 1968 by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the American Statistical Association. The tests of the joint...

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...

For many years a system of leading, coincident, and lagging economic indicators, first developed in the 1930s by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), has been widely used in the United States to appraise the state of the business cycle. Since 1961 the current monthly figures for...