Critics of Governor Michael Dukakis have suggested that this year?s $400 million overestimate of tax revenues in Massachusetts casts doubt on his putative managerial skills. In this paper, we carefully examine the entire Dukakis forecasting record. We find that the 1988 experience was "unusual?...

In recent months, the governors of several states have suffered major political embarrassments because actual revenues fell, substantially short of the predictions in their respective budgets. Such episodes focus attention on the question of whether states do a "good" job of forecasting...

This paper constructs high-frequency and timely income distributions for the United States. We develop a methodology to combine the information contained in high-frequency public data sources--including monthly household and employment surveys, quarterly censuses of employment and wages, and...

The paper studies forecasts of real growth rates and budget balances made by official government agencies among 33 countries. In general, the forecasts are found: (i) to have a positive average bias, (ii) to be more biased in booms, (iii) to be even more biased at the 3-year horizon than at...