A well-known puzzle in international finance is that a random walk predicts exchange rates better than economic models. I offer a potential explanation. When exchange rates and fundamentals are highly persistent, long-horizon forecasts of economic models are biased by the estimation error. When...

This paper analyzes the importance of monetary and fiscal policy shocks in explaining US macroeconomic fluctuations, and establishes new stylized facts. The novelty of our empirical analysis is that we jointly consider both monetary and fiscal policy, whereas the existing literature only focuses...

We propose a theoretical framework for assessing whether a forecast model estimated over one period can provide good forecasts over a subsequent period. We formalize this idea by defining a forecast breakdown as a situation in which the out-of-sample performance of the model, judged by some loss...

This paper is a comprehensive comparison of existing methods for constructing confidence bands for univariate impulse response functions in the presence of high persistence. Monte Carlo results show that Kilian (1998a), Wright (2000), Gospodinov (2004) and Pesavento and Rossi (2005) have...

The objective of this paper is to identify which parameters of a model are stable over time. Existing procedures can only be used to test whether a given subset of parameters is stable, and cannot be used to find which subset of parameters is stable. We propose a new procedure that is...

A well-known puzzle in the international finance literature is that a random walk predicts exchange rates better than economic models (Meese and Rogoff, 1983a, b and 1988). This paper offers a potential explanation for this finding. When exchange rates and fundamentals are highly persistent,...

We provide an extensive evaluation of the predictive performance of the U.S. yield curve for U.S. GDP growth by using a new test for forecast breakdown as well as a variety of in-sample and out-of-sample testing procedures. Empirical research over the past decades uncovered a strong predictive...

We propose a new Information Criterion for Impulse Response Function Matching estimators of the structural parameters of macroeconomic models. The main advantage of our procedure is that it allows the researcher to select the impulse responses that are most informative about the deep parameters,...