Global recovery is progressing more slowly than was indicated in 2020 due to high coronavirus rates and related economic restrictions in Europe and Japan. Recently, a disparate picture has been forming: In the advanced economies, declining infection rates and continued progress in vaccination...

Central banks' projections-i.e. forecasts conditional on a given interest rate path-are often criticized on the grounds that their underlying policy assumptions are inconsistent with the existence of a unique equilibrium in many forward-looking models. Here I describe three alternative...

There is a broad consensus in the literature that costs of information processing and acquisition may generate costly disagreements in expectations among economic agents, and that central banks may play a central role in reducing such dispersion in expectations. This paper analyses empirically...

Central banks' projections-i.e. forecasts conditional on a given interest rate path-are often criticized on the grounds that their underlying policy assumptions are inconsistent with the existence of a unique equilibrium in many forward-looking models. Here I describe three alternative...

Are structural models getting closer to being able to forecast exchange rates at short horizons? Here we argue that misinterpretation of some new out-of-sample tests for nested models, over-reliance on asymptotic test statistics, and failure to sufficiently check robustness to alternative time...

Macroeconomic forecasts are persistently too optimistic. This paper finds that common factors related to general uncertainty about U.S. macrofinancial prospects and global demand drive this overoptimism. These common factors matter most for advanced economies and G- 20 countries. The results...

We use a previously unexploited consensus survey data set to compare accuracy, unbiasedness and efficiency of Current Account growth forecasts between two panels of 25 developed and 18 developing countries following the methodologies in the existing literature. Forecast errors are bigger for the...