This paper analyzes the ability of both economic variables and moving-average rules to forecast the monthly U.S. equity premium using out-of-sample tests for 1960?2008. Both approaches provide statistically and economically significant out-of-sample forecasting gains, which are concentrated in...

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...

Ever since the seminal paper of, researchers have focused on the potential nonstationarity of important macroeconomic variables, and unit root tests are now a standard procedure in empirical analyses. While there are many findings of unit roots in macroeconomic variables using the popular...

Common shocks, similarities in central bank reaction functions, and international trade potentially produce common components in international inflation rates. This paper characterizes such links in international inflation rates with a dynamic latent factor model that decomposes inflation for 65...

The effect of monetary policy on the farm sector remains controversial. Studies attempting to quantify the effects of monetary disturbances on real farm prices report conflicting results: some find that positive monetary shocks increase real farm prices in the short run, while others detect no...

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 examine different approaches to forecasting monthly US employment growth in the presence of many potentially relevant predictors. We first generate simulated out-of-sample forecasts of US employment growth at multiple horizons using individual autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models...

Given the marked differences in housing price growth across USregions since the mid-1990s, we investigate forecasts of state-level real housing price growth for 1995-2006. We evaluate forecasts from an autoregressive benchmark model as well as models based on a host of state, regional, and...