One of the strongest leading indicators of economic activity is the number of people who file for unemployment benefits. Macroeconomists Robert Gordon and James Hamilton have recently examined the historical evidence. According to Hamilton's summary: "... in each of the last six recessions, the...

We study how individual unemployment expectations are shaped and updated using a unique longitudinal survey data set with subjective unemployment expectations. The survey data is linked with third-party reported administrative data on unemployment realizations, such that we are able to examine...

Temporal climate risk weighs heavily on many of the world's poor. Model-based climate forecasts could benefit such populations, provided recipients use forecast information to update climate expectations. We test whether pastoralists in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya update their...

This note shows that combining external forecasts such as the Survey of Professional Fore casters can significantly increase DSGE forecast accuracy while preserving the interpretability in terms of structural shocks. Applied to pseudo real-time from 1997q2 onward, the canonical Smets and Wouters...