reliability of the measurement of the output gap has attracted relatively little academic study. Furthermore, both the academic … concentrate on measurement that employs data that only become available later. In this paper we examine the reliability of … alternative output detrending methods, with special attention to the accuracy of real-time estimates. We show that ex post …

Output gaps that are estimated in real time can differ substantially from those estimated after the fact. We aim to … understand the real-time instability of output gap estimates by comparing a suite of reduced-form models. We propose a new … statistical decomposition and find that including a Okun’s law relationship improves real-time stability by alleviating the end …