Identifying News Shocks with Forecast Data

Recent studies attempt to quantify the empirical importance of news shocks (ie., anticipated future schocks) in business cycle fluctuations. This paper identifies news schocks in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model estimated with not only actual data but also forecast data. The estimation results show new empirical evidence that antecipated future technology shocks are the most important driving force of U.S. business cycles. The use of the forecast data makes the anticipated shocks play a much more important role in fitting model-implied expectations to this data, since such shocks have persistent effects on the expectaions and thereby help to replicate the observed persistence of the forecasts.