Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
Jel Classification:E17 

Working Paper
Assessing Macroeconomic Tail Risk

What drives macroeconomic tail risk? To answer this question, we borrow a definition of macroeconomic risk from Adrian et al. (2019) by studying (left-tail) percentiles of the forecast distribution of GDP growth. We use local projections (Jord, 2005) to assess how this measure of risk moves in response to economic shocks to the level of technology, monetary policy, and financial conditions. Furthermore, by studying various percentiles jointly, we study how the overall economic outlook?as characterized by the entire forecast distribution of GDP growth?shifts in response to shocks. We find that ...
Working Paper , Paper 19-10

Working Paper
Understanding the New Normal : The Role of Demographics

Since the onset of the Great Recession, the U.S. economy has experienced low real GDP growth and low real interest rates, including for long maturities. We show that these developments were largely predictable by calibrating an overlapping-generation model with a rich demographic structure to observed and projected changes in U.S. population, family composition, life expectancy, and labor market activity. The model accounts for a 1?percentage point decline in both real GDP growth and the equilibrium real interest rate since 1980?essentially all of the permanent declines in those variables ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2016-080

Newsletter
How Tight is U.S. Monetary Policy

In this Chicago Fed Letter, we use a quantitative macroeconomic model to tackle the question of whether the response of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) to recent high inflation is consistent with its historical behavior. This is an important question because systematic deviations from past behavior could lead the private sector to revise its expectations about how the Fed will respond to inflation going forward, which, according to macroeconomic theory, could affect its ability to stabilize inflation in the future.
Chicago Fed Letter , Volume No 476

Working Paper
A Unified Framework for Dimension Reduction in Forecasting

Factor models are widely used in summarizing large datasets with few underlying latent factors and in building time series forecasting models for economic variables. In these models, the reduction of the predictors and the modeling and forecasting of the response y are carried out in two separate and independent phases. We introduce a potentially more attractive alternative, Sufficient Dimension Reduction (SDR), that summarizes x as it relates to y, so that all the information in the conditional distribution of y|x is preserved. We study the relationship between SDR and popular estimation ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2017-004

Working Paper
Forecasting Foreign Economic Growth Using Cross-Country Data

We construct a monthly measure of foreign economic growth based on a wide range of cross-county indicators. Unlike GDP data, which are normally released with a delay of one to two quarters in most countries, our monthly measure incorporates monthly information up to the current month. As new information arrives, this measure of foreign growth can be updated as frequently as daily. This monthly measure of foreign growth not only helps gauge the economic conditions in other countries but also provides a timely measure of foreign demand to help forecast U.S. export growth.
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 18-14

Working Paper
An Investigation into the Uncertainty Revision Process of Professional Forecasters

Following Manzan (2021), this paper examines how professional forecasters revise their fixed-event uncertainty (variance) forecasts and tests the Bayesian learning prediction that variance forecasts should decrease as the horizon shortens. We show that Manzan's (2021) use of first moment "efficiency" tests are not applicable to studying revisions of variance forecasts. Instead, we employ monotonicity tests developed by Patton and Timmermann (2012) in the first application of these tests to second moments of survey expectations. We find strong evidence that the variance forecasts are ...
Working Papers , Paper 24-19

Working Paper
What's the Story? A New Perspective on the Value of Economic Forecasts

We apply textual analysis tools to measure the degree of optimism versus pessimism of the text that describes Federal Reserve Board forecasts published in the Greenbook. The resulting measure of Greenbook text sentiment, ?Tonality,? is found to be strongly correlated, in the intuitive direction, with the Greenbook point forecast for key economic variables such as unemployment and inflation. We then examine whether Tonality has incremental power for predicting unemployment, GDP growth, and inflation up to four quarters ahead. We find it to have significant and substantive predictive power for ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2017-107

Working Paper
Nowcasting Tail Risks to Economic Activity with Many Indicators

This paper focuses on nowcasts of tail risk to GDP growth, with a potentially wide array of monthly and weekly information. We consider different models (Bayesian mixed frequency regressions with stochastic volatility, classical and Bayesian quantile regressions, quantile MIDAS regressions) and also different methods for data reduction (either forecasts from models that incorporate data reduction or the combination of forecasts from smaller models). Our results show that, within some limits, more information helps the accuracy of nowcasts of tail risk to GDP growth. Accuracy typically ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-13R

Report
Vulnerable growth

We study the conditional distribution of GDP growth as a function of economic and financial conditions. Deteriorating financial conditions are associated with an increase in the conditional volatility and a decline in the conditional mean of GDP growth, leading the lower quantiles of GDP growth to vary with financial conditions and the upper quantiles to be stable over time: Upside risks to GDP growth are low in most periods while downside risks increase as financial conditions become tighter. We argue that amplification mechanisms in the financial sector generate the observed growth ...
Staff Reports , Paper 794

Report
Forecasting Macroeconomic Risks

We construct risks around consensus forecasts of real GDP growth, unemployment, and inflation. We find that risks are time-varying, asymmetric, and partly predictable. Tight financial conditions forecast downside growth risk, upside unemployment risk, and increased uncertainty around the inflation forecast. Growth vulnerability arises as the conditional mean and conditional variance of GDP growth are negatively correlated: downside risks are driven by lower mean and higher variance when financial conditions tighten. Similarly, employment vulnerability arises as the conditional mean and ...
Staff Reports , Paper 914

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Content Type

FILTER BY Author

Clark, Todd E. 12 items

Carriero, Andrea 10 items

Marcellino, Massimiliano 7 items

Cotton, Christopher D. 4 items

Giannone, Domenico 4 items

Mertens, Elmar 4 items

show more (85)

FILTER BY Jel Classification

E37 29 items

C53 25 items

C32 13 items

E31 12 items

F47 11 items

show more (53)

FILTER BY Keywords

Forecasting 9 items

downside risk 5 items

forecasting 5 items

pandemics 5 items

quantile regressions 5 items

COVID-19 4 items

show more (156)

PREVIOUS / NEXT