Traditional approaches use balance sheet assessment to forecast bank rescue costs and often underestimate real costs. Thus, governments commit to bailouts without credible forecasts of costs, which can lead to serious fiscal issues. We propose a new approach based on distributional information...

In an influential paper, Devries et al. (2011) construct narrative series of tax- and spending-based fiscal adjustments for a panel of OECD countries. In this paper, we find that the adjustments based on spending cuts can be predicted on the basis of past output growth and other macroeconomic...

This paper argues that any assessment on the intentional stance of fiscal policy should be based upon all the information available to policymakers at the time of fiscal planning. In particular, real-time data on the discretionary fiscal policy "instrument", the structural primary balance,...

Since the outbreak of the European debt crisis, fiscal sustainability as a research area became more and more popular. This paper aims to assess the predicting power of the basic types of the following five fiscal sustainability indicators: primary gap (1), stationary tests for public debt (2),...

Using a sample of the 48 contiguous United States, we consider the problem of forecasting state and local governments' revenues and expenditures in real time using models that feature mixed-frequency data. We find that single-equation mixed data sampling (MIDAS) regressions that predict...

We forecast New York state tax revenues with a mixed-frequency model using a number of machine learning techniques. We found boosting with two dynamic factors extracted from a select list of New York and U.S. leading indicators did best in terms of correctly updating revenues for the fiscal year...

We develop a debt-to-GDP forecasting framework incorporating the classical debt accounting relationship relating the debt-to-GDP ratio to its previous period value, the growth rate of the economy, the government cost of debt service, and the primary balance. We present a linearization of the...

This paper describes how stochastic population forecasts are used to inform and analyze policies related to government spending on the elderly, mainly in the context of the industrialized nations. The paper first presents methods for making probabilistic forecasts of demographic rates,...

Global warming, sea level rise, and extreme weather events have made climate change a top priority for policymakers across the globe. But which policies are best suited to tackle the enormous challenges presented by our changing climate? This Article proposes that policymakers turn to prediction...

This paper describes how stochastic population forecasts are used to inform and analyze policies related to government spending on the elderly, mainly in the context of the industrialized nations. The paper first presents methods for making probabilistic forecasts of demographic rates,...