We consider simple methods to improve the growth nowcasts and forecasts obtained by mixed frequency MIDAS and UMIDAS models with a variety of indicators during the Covid-19 crisis and recovery period, such as combining forecasts across various specifications for the same model and/or across...

A series of standard and penalized logistic regression models is used for modeling and forecasting Great Recession and COVID-19 recession in the US. These two recessions are scrutinized by taking a close look at the movement of five chosen predictors themselves and their regression coefficients...

Consumers' expected income growth declined significantly during the Great Recession. It was the most severe drop ever observed in these data, and expectations have not yet fully recovered. Furthermore, this article shows that expected income growth is a strong predictor of actual future income...

This paper will provide information on what happened in the financial crisis of 2008 and how to graph volatility outside of the option market. We will investigate the causes of the financial crisis, as well as some of the social inequalities that still exist today. We will explore household...

This paper uses data from 1960-2015 to evaluate the predictive content of financial variables and unconventional monetary policy measures for the U.S. output growth and inflation before, during, and after the Great Recession. During the Great Recession, this work shows that the predictive...

Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decisions rely on economic forecasts from the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) staff. This paper analyzes the forecasts of GDP growth, inflation, and unemployment by the FRB staff and the FOMC from 2009 through 2016. Forecasts for the current year are positively...

The Great Recession and the subsequent period of subdued GDP growth in most advanced economies have highlighted the need for macroeconomic forecasters to account for sudden and deep recessions, periods of higher macroeconomic volatility, and fluctuations in trend GDP growth. In this paper, we...

We propose a parsimonious semiparametric method for macroeconomic forecasting during episodes of sudden changes. Based on the notion of clustering and similarity, we partition the time series into blocks, search for the closest blocks to the most recent block of observations, and with the...

Financial crises pose unique challenges for forecast accuracy. Using the IMF's Monitoring of Fund Arrangement (MONA) database, we conduct the most comprehensive evaluation of IMF forecasts to date for countries in times of crises. We examine 29 macroeconomic variables in terms of bias,...

Notwithstanding persistently-high unemployment following the Great Recession, inflation in the United States has been remarkably stable. We find that a traditional Phillips curve describes the behavior of inflation reasonably well since the 1960s. Using a non-linear Kalman filter that allows for...