This paper evaluates the performance of Consensus Forecasts of real GDP growth for a large number of industrialized and developing countries for the time period October 1989 to December 1999. The questions addressed are the following: How accurate are private sector forecasts? How does their...

Many studies have attempted to uncover empirical regularities in how countries choose their exchange rate regimes. We survey previous studies showing that, taken as a whole, the literature is inconclusive. Drawing on a large dataset with many potential explanatory variables and a variety of...

E2, J3, J5, J6 </AbstractSection> Copyright Blanchard et al.; licensee Springer. 2014

We study forecasts for real GDP growth using a large panel of individual forecasts from 36 advanced and emerging economies during 1989–2010. We show that the degree of information rigidity in average forecasts is substantially higher than that in individual forecasts. Individual level...

We examine the behavior of forecasts for real GDP growth using a large panel of individual forecasts from 30 advanced and emerging economies during 1989-2010. Our main findings are as follows. First, our evidence does not support the validity of the sticky information model (Mankiw and Reis,...

Recessions leave scars on the labor market. Over 200 million people across the globe are estimated to be unemployed at present resulting from the Great Recession of 2007–09. We assess the human cost of increased unemployment by surveying what is known about the effects of past recessions....

The authors estimate the impact of price uncertainty on investment using a panel of U.S. manufacturing industries. Pooling the data for all industries, uncertainty has no impact on current investment. However, for industries that have low levels of seller concentration and, thus, are likely to...

Recent empirical analyses show that asset flows can be modelled by the same "gravity" equations that trade economists have used so successfully for the past few decades. This is something of a surprise. Trade economists do not yet have a unified theory of why gravity models should work--and the...

Do increases in China's exports reduce exports of other emerging Asian economies? We find that correlations between Chinese export growth and that of other emerging Asian economies are actually positive (though usually not significant), even after controlling for trading-partner income growth...