Research has shown that birthweight has a lasting impact on later-life outcomes such as educational attainment and earnings. This paper examines the role of health at birth in determining academic achievement in childhood, which may provide the link between birthweight and adult outcomes. Using...

Binary events are involved in many economic decision problems. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in diverse disciplines in developing models for forecasting binary outcomes. We distinguish between two types of forecasts for binary events that are generally obtained as the...

We study the role of consumer confidence surveys in forecasting personal consumption expenditure. We reexamine existing models of consumption and consumer confidence using both quarterly and monthly data in real time. Additionally, we produce forecasts of consumption expenditures with and...

While the yield spread has long been recognized as a good predictor of recessions, it seems to have been largely overlooked by professional forecasters. We examine this puzzle, established by Rudebusch and Williams (2009), in a data-rich environment including not just the yield spread but many...

Evaluation methodologies for rare events from meteorology, psychology and medical diagnosis are used to examine the value of probabilistic forecasts of real GDP declines during the current quarter (Q0) and each of the next four quarters (Q1–Q4) using data from the Survey of Professional...

We study the information content of the five components of the University of Michigan¡¯s Index of Consumer Sentiment and identify the main determinants of these measures, using semiparametric ordered choice models and household data from the Surveys of Consumers from January 1978 to September...

While the yield spread has long been recognized as a good predictor of recessions, it seems to have been largely overlooked by professional forecasters. We examine this puzzle, established by Rudebusch and Williams (2009), in a data-rich environment including not just the yield spread but many...

We combine the probability forecasts of real GDP declines from the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters, after trimming the forecasts that do not have "value" in the sense of Merton (1981). For this purpose, we propose a new test to evaluate probability forecasts that does not require...