Macroeconomic policy decisions in real-time are based the assessment of current and future economic conditions. These assessments are made difficult by the presence of incomplete and noisy data. The problem is more acute for emerging market economies, where most economic data are released...

Financial conditions indexes are developed for the United States and euro area using a wide range of financial indicators and a dynamic factor model. The financial conditions indexes are shown to be useful for forecasting economic activity and have good revision properties.

A stochastic debt forecasting framework is presented where projected debt distributions reflect both the joint realization of the fiscal policy reaction to contemporaneous stochastic macroeconomic projections, and also the second-round effects of fiscal policy on macroeconomic projections. The...

This paper presents evidence that the economic stall speed concept has some empirical content, and can be moderately useful in forecasting recessions. Specifically, output tends to transition to a slow-growth phase at the end of expansions before falling into a recession, and the paper designs...

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, New Jersey Bankers Association, May 12, 2011, Aventura, Florida

We illustrate the importance of placing model-consistent restrictions on expectations in the estimation of forward-looking Euler equations. In two-stage limited-information settings where first-stage estimates are used to proxy for expectations, parameter estimates can differ substantially,...

In their 2010 comment (which we refer to as CS10), Cogley and Sbordone argue that: (1) our estimates are not entirely closed form, and hence are arbitrary; (2) we cannot guarantee that our estimates are valid, while their estimates (Cogley and Sbordone 2008, henceforth CS08) always are; and (3)...

Using survey data of market expectations, we ask which popular exchange rate models appear to be consistent with expectation formation of market forecasters. Exchange rate expectations are found to be correlated with inflation differentials and productivity differentials, indicating that the...

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Society of Business Economists Annual Conference, London, England, June 9, 2011