In this paper we study what professional forecasters actually explain. We use spectral analysis and state space modeling to decompose economic time series into a trend, a business-cycle, and an irregular component. To examine which components are captured by professional forecasters we regress...

We provide a new way to filter US inflation into trend and cycle components, based on extracting long-run forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. We operate the Kalman filter in reverse, beginning with observed forecasts, then estimating parameters, and then extracting the...

An accurate forecast of intraday volume is a key aspect of algorithmic trading. This manuscript proposes a state-space model to forecast intraday trading volume via the Kalman filter and derives closed-form expectation-maximization (EM) solutions for model calibration. The model is extended to...