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?...

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...

Every country faces what economists call an intertemporal (across time) budget constraint, which requires that its government's future expenditures, including the servicing of its outstanding official debt, be covered by its government's future receipts when measured in present value. The...

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...

This paper investigates forecasts of U.S. inflation at the 12-month horizon. The starting point is the conventional unemployment rate Phillips curve, which is examined in a simulated out of sample forecasting framework. Inflation forecasts produced by the Phillips curve generally have been more...

Subsequent to the October 1979 shift in monetary policy in the United States, interest rates in North America not only reached unprecedented levels,but also exhibited unprecedented volatility. This paper shows that the anticipated quarterly changes in long-term rates associated with the rational...

This paper addresses the question of whether nominal Eurocurrency interest rates provide significant information about expected inflation. To test this question two sets of inflation forecasts for the U.S. and five European countries were generated: 1) from time series of past inflation rates;2)...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy in a small, open economy with a floating exchange rate, sticky wages, and rational expectations in both the asset and labor markets. The model developed emphasizes the link between exchange-rate depreciation and nominal wage inflation, embodying...