Richard T. Baillie and Tim Bollerslev (1989) have recently argued that nominal dollar spot exchange rates are cointegrated. Here the authors examine an immediate implication of their finding, namely, that cointegration implies an error-correction representation yielding forecasts superior to...

The relationship between wholesale and retail interest rates since deregulation is of substantial interest to economists and policymakers, because the predictability of the monetary aggregates and their relationship to bank reserves depend on adjustment patterns in the wholesale and retail...

The authors propose a constructive, multivariate framework for assessing agreement between (generally misspecified) dynamic equilibrium models and data, which enables a complete second-order comparison of the dynamic properties of models and data. They use bootstrap algorithms to evaluate the...

Does the termination probability of a business expansion or contraction increase with age? This question may be formally addressed by analyzing the nature of duration dependence in aggregate economic activity. The author's null hypothesis is that there is no duration dependence, which they test...

In the first half of this century, special attention was given to two features of the business cycle: the comovement of many individual economic series and the different behavior of the economy during expansions and contractions. Recent theoretical and empirical research has revived interest in...

We make three related contributions. First, we propose a new technique for solving prediction problems under asymmetric loss using piecewise-linear approximations to the loss function, and we establish existence and uniqueness of the optimal predictor. Second, we provide a detailed application...

This package performs specialized tasks related to specification, estimation, prediction and diagnostic checking in the context of a particular class of unobserved-components models. It is menu-driven and easy to use. Although the present (first) release suffers from a number of limitations,...

The authors evaluate the ability of the composite index of leading indicators to predict business cycle turning points. Formal probability-assessment scoring rules are applied to turning-point probabilities generated from the leading index via a Bayesian sequential probability recursion. These...

We propose a measure of predictability based on the ratio of the expected loss of a short-run forecast to the expected loss of a long-run forecast. This predictability measure can be tailored to the forecast horizons of interest, and it allows for general loss functions, univariate or...