Using real-time data, we analyze how the systematic expectation errors of professional forecasters in 19 advanced economies depend on the state of the business cycle. Our results indicate that the general result that forecasters systematically overestimate output growth (across all countries)...

This paper presents a Bayesian methodology for estimating probability of a downturn in the economy and applies it to the 2007-2008 state of the U.S. economy with the focus on investigating the occurrence of a recession. In the methodological development, information theory (Kullback and Shannon)...

Four model selection methods are applied to the problem of predicting business cycle turning points: equally-weighted forecasts, Bayesian model averaged forecasts, and two models produced by the machine learning algorithm boosting. The model selection algorithms condition on different economic...

We describe the evolution of forecasts in the run-up to recessions. The GDP forecasts cover 63 countries for the years 1992 to 2014. The main finding is that, while forecasters are generally aware that recession years will be different from other years, they miss the magnitude of the recession...

This paper proposes the use of forecast combination to improve predictive accuracy in forecasting the U.S. business cycle index as published by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the NBER. It focuses on one-step ahead out-of-sample monthly forecast utilising the well-established coincident...

Accommodative monetary policy during the financial crisis was instrumental in preventing a deeper recession. Views differ, however, on how long such measures should be kept in place. At the heart of this debate is the notion that a protracted period of policy accommodation could create...

In the monthly ifo Business Survey around 9,000 German companies answer questions about their current business situation, expectations and plans for the near future as well as on other business variables. This paper provides an overview of all regular questions (monthly, quarterly, bi-annually,...

This paper uses several macroeconomic and financial indicators within a Markov Switching (MS) framework to predict the turning points of the business cycle. The presented model is applied to monthly German real-time data covering the recession and the recovery after the financial crisis. We show...