While macroeconomic variables have been used extensively to forecast the U.S. equity risk premium and build models to explain it, relatively little attention has been paid to the technical stock market indicators widely employed by practitioners. Our paper fills this gap by studying the...

We analyze comovements in four measures of budget surpluses for 18 OECD countries for 1980-2008 with a dynamic latent factor model. The world factor in national budget surpluses declines substantially in the 1980s, rises throughout much of the 1990s to a peak in 2000, before declining again in...

We construct monthly economic-activity indices for 51 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas for 1990 to 2014. Each index is computed via a dynamic factor model that includes 14 variables measuring various aspects of economic activity in a metro area. We estimate the dynamic factor model using the...

It is a robust finding that technical trading rules applied to foreign exchange markets have earned substantial excess returns over long periods of time. However, the approach to risk adjustment has typically been rather cursory, and has tended to focus on the CAPM. We examine the returns to a...

The real interest rate plays a central role in many important financial and macroeconomic models, including the consumption-based asset pricing model, neoclassical growth model, and models of the monetary transmission mechanism. The authors selectively survey the empirical literature that...

We evaluate forecasting models of US business fixed investment spending growth over the recent 1995:1-2004:2 out-of-sample period. The forecasting models are based on the conventional Accelerator, Neoclassical, Average Q, and Cash-Flow models of investment spending, as well as real stock prices...

In this article we examine the structural stability of predictive regression models of U.S. quarterly aggregate real stock returns over the postwar era. We consider predictive regressions models of S&P 500 and CRSP equal-weighted real stock returns based on eight financial variables that display...