This paper discusses recent research at the Centre for Growth and Business Cycle Research on the prediction of the expansion and recession phases of the business cycle for the UK, US, Germany, France and Italy. Financial variables are important predictors in these models, with the stock market...

This article presents a methodology for decomposing ex ante forecasting error into exogenous variable error, data revision error, model error and judgement error. This methodology is applied to the forecasts made by the National Institute in February 1975 and February 1976. The first section...