This paper uses real-time data for the U.S. to estimate out-of-sample forecast uncertainty about the Federal Funds Rate. By combining a Taylor rule with an unobserved components model of economic fundamentals I separate forecast uncertainty into economically interpretable components that...

This paper studies uncertainty about out-of-sample interest rate forecasts implied by an estimated Taylor rule. It is shown that the Taylor rule leads to a decomposition of forecast uncertainty into an element that depends on uncertainty about the future state of the economy and another element...

We use a Taylor rule with time-varying policy coefficients in combination with an unobserved components model for the output gap to estimate the uncertainty about future values of the Federal Funds Rate. The model makes it possible to separate ex-ante interest rate uncertainty into three...

In this paper, the application of two different unobserved factor models to a data set from Estonia is presented. The small-scale state-space model used by Stock and Watson (1991) and the large-scale static principal components model used by Stock and Watson (2002) are employed to derive common...

The Stock--Watson coincident index and its subsequent extensions assume a static linear one-factor model for the component indicators. Such assumption is restrictive in practice, however, with as few as four indicators. In fact, such assumption is unnecessary if one poses the index construction...

Recently, two stylized facts about the behavior of the U.S. economy have emerged: first, macroeconomic aggregates appear to be less volatile post-1984 than in the preceding two decades; second, monetary policy appears more responsive to inflationary pressures—and thereby more “stabilizing”...

Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, a fact often neglected in modeling consumer price inflation.  Using a novel methodology grounded in theory, the ten sub-components of the consumer price index (excluding mortgage interest rates), are modeled separately and forecast,...

We define and forecast classical business cycle turning points for the Norwegian economy. When defining reference business cycles, we compare a univariate and a multivariate Bry-Boschan approach with univariate Markov-switching models and Markov-switching factor models. On the basis of a...

The interest in empirical studies of monetary policy has increased in the last decade. The deregulation of financial markets and the increased use of explicit policy rules and targets have made monetary policy more transparent and interesting for economic analysis. This paper demonstrates how a...

This paper investigates the precision of multivariate models of the output gap and considers their implications for the formulation of macroeconomic policy. Multivariate models identify the gap by including information from structural economic relationships, such as Okun's Law, the Phillips...