Simple surveys that ask people who they expect to win are among the most accurate methods for forecasting U.S. presidential elections. The majority of respondents correctly predicted the election winner in 193 (89%) of 217 surveys conducted from 1932 to 2012. Across the last 100 days prior to...

We assess the contribution of macroeconomic uncertainty - approximated by the dispersion of the real GDP survey forecasts - to the ex post and ex ante prediction of stock price bubbles. For a panel of six OECD economies covering 24 years, two alternative binary chronologies of bubble periods are...

We develop metrics based on Shapley values for interpreting time-series forecasting models, including “black-box” models from machine learning. Our metrics are model agnostic, so that they are applicable to any model (linear or nonlinear, parametric or nonparametric). Two of the metrics,...

This paper provides an assessment of the consistency of unemployment and output forecasts. We show that, consistent with Okun’s Law, forecasts of real GDP growth and the change in unemployment are negatively correlated. The Okun coefficient—the responsiveness of unemployment to growth—from...