A wave of recent research has studied the predictability of foreign currency returns. A wide variety of forecasting structures have been proposed, including signals such as carry, value, momentum, and the forward curve. Some of these have been explored individually, and others have been used in...

The past 30 years have been witness to an inexorable change in the degree to which economies are connected internationally. At the same time, the 2007-2008 recession was the first ‘global recession' in decades. This article explores how international trade and cross-border holdings financial...

A factor stochastic volatility model estimates the common component to estimates of the output gap produced by the staff of the Federal Reserve, its time-varying volatility, and time-varying, horizon-specific forecast uncertainty. Output gap estimates are very uncertain, even well after the...

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...

This paper introduces a new empirical strategy for the characterization of business cycles. It combines non-parametric decoding methods that classify a series into expansions and recessions but does not require specification of the underlying stochastic process generating the data. It then uses...

A wave of recent research has studied the predictability of foreign currency returns. A wide variety of forecasting structures have been proposed, including signals such as carry, value, momentum, and the forward curve. Some of these have been explored individually, and others have been used in...

We propose a framework to evaluate the conditionality of forecasts. The crux of our framework is the observation that a forecast is conditional if revisions to the conditioning factor are faithfully incorporated into the remainder of the forecast. We consider whether the Greenbook, Blue Chip,...