When the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston chose "Rethinking the International Monetary System" as the topic for its 43rd Economic Conference, it was clear that the worst international financial crisis in decades had caused tremors within the economics profession and the policymaking establishment....

Analysis of oil-price movements is once again an important feature of economic policy discussions. To provide some background for this analysis, this paper summarizes a conference on the oil market held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in June 2010. Four cross-cutting themes emerged from...

Analysis of oil-price movements is once again an important feature of economic policy discussions. To provide some background for this analysis, this paper summarizes a conference on the oil market held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in June 2010. Four cross-cutting themes emerged from...

Using U.S. real-time data, we show that changes in the unemployment rate unexplained by Okun's Law have significant predictive power for GDP data revisions. A positive (negative) error in Okun's Law in real time implies that GDP will be later revised to show less (more) growth than initially...

The authors derive an estimate of the Federal Reserve's assessment of the natural rate of unemployment in real time from the Greenbook forecast of inflation. The estimated natural rate starts to rise noticeably in the second half of the mid-1970s. It stays relatively high in the 1980s, and then...

We assess the ability of the Reuters/Michigan Surveys of Consumers to predict future changes in consumer expenditures. The information in the Surveys is summarized by means of principal components of consumer attitudes with respect to income and wealth, interest rates, and prices. These summary...

A large set of financial variables has only limited power to predict a latent factor common to the year-ahead forecast errors for real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, the unemployment rate, and Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation for three sets of professional forecasters: the Federal...