This paper proposes a contemporaneous smooth transition threshold autoregressive model (C-STAR) as a modification of the smooth transition threshold autoregressive model surveyed in Teräsvirta (1998), in which the regime weights depend on the ex ante probability that a latent regime-specific...

Economists have tried to uncover stylized facts about people’s expectations, testing whether such expectations are rational. Tests in the early 1980s suggested that expectations were biased, and some economists took irrational expectations as a stylized fact. But, over time, the results of...

A comparison of the performance of forecasts by economists (the Livingston survey), households (the Michigan Survey of Consumer Finances), and a time series model (ARIMA).

Tests of rational expectations in foreign exchange markets have been inconclusive because of disagreement over the underlying asset pricing model. This paper uses a newly available set of data on foreign exchange forecasts to examine directly expectations formation in four foreign currency...

This paper discusses at an undergraduate level how forecast rationality can be tested. It explains that forecasters should correctly use any relevant information they knew in making their predictions. It shows that forecast rationality can be tested by determining whether the forecasters'...

We jointly test the rationality of the Federal Reserve’s Greenbook forecasts of infiation, unemployment, and output growth using a multivariate nonseparable asymmetric loss function. We find that the forecasts are rationalizable and exhibit directional asymmetry. The degree of asymmetry...