The progressive globalization of markets has sparked a worldwide interest in using economic indicators to analyze cyclical fluctuations. Governments and the private sector seeking to conduct their activities in light of both national and international economic conditions could benefit from...

Many economists believe that a central bank’s transparency about its objectives, economic outlook, and policy changes affect the public’s views about future economic and financial conditions. In keeping with this theory, since 1994 the Federal Open Market Committee has gradually increased...

During the past two decades, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have taken center stage in academic macroeconomics. Nonetheless, these models are still rarely used in policy-making and forecasting. ; This article describes the workings of the DSGE-VAR, a procedure that combines...

We show that professional forecasters have essentially no ability to predict future recessions a few quarters ahead. This is particularly puzzling because, for at least the past two decades, researchers have provided much evidence that the yield curve, specifically the spread between long- and...

Linearized New Keynesian models and empirical no-arbitrage macro-finance models offer little insight regarding the implications of changes in bond term premiums for economic activity. We investigate these implications using both a structural model and a reduced-form framework. We show that there...

This article surveys recent research on the usefulness of the term spread (i.e., the difference between the yields on long-term and short-term Treasury securities) for predicting changes in economic activity. Most studies use linear regression techniques to forecast changes in output or...

We start from the assertion that a useful monetary policy design should be founded on more realistic assumptions about what policymakers can know at the time when policy decisions have to be made. Since the Taylor rule – if used as an operational device - implies a forward looking behaviour,...