We forecast US state-level employment growth using several distinct econometric approaches: combinations of individual autoregressive distributed lag models, general-to-specific modeling with bootstrap aggregation (GETS-bagging), and approximate factor (or “beta”) models. Our results show...

Welch and Goyal (2008) find that numerous economic variables with in-sample predictive ability for the equity premium fail to deliver consistent out-of-sample forecasting gains relative to the historical average. Arguing that model uncertainty and instability seriously impair the forecasting...