In this paper we study what professional forecasters actually explain. We use spectral analysis and state space modeling to decompose economic time series into a trend, a business-cycle, and an irregular component. To examine which components are captured by professional forecasters we regress...

Many complex systems display fluctuations between alternative states in correspondence to tipping points. These critical shifts are usually associated with generic empirical phenomena such as strengthening correlations between entities composing the system. In finance, for instance, market...