Regulatory policy can create economic and social benefits, but poorly designed or excessive regulation may generate substantial adverse effects on the economy. In this paper, we present measures of sentiment and uncertainty about regulation in the U.S. over time and examine their relationships...

In this paper we present an evaluation of forecasts of a vector of variables of the German economy made by different institutions. Our method permits one to evaluate the forecasts for each year and then if one is interested to combine the years. We use our method to determine an overall winner...

There is a large literature evaluating the forecasts of the Federal Reserve by testing their rationality and measuring the size of their forecast errors. There is also a substantial literature and debate on the impact of the Fed's monetary policy on the economy. We know little, however about the...

Near term forecasts, also called nowcasts, are most challenging but also most important when the economy experiences an abrupt change. In this paper, we explore the performance of models with different information sets and data structures in order to best nowcast US initial unemployment claims...

The Beveridge-Nelson (BN) trend-cycle decomposition based on autoregressive forecasting models of U.S. quarterly real GDP growth produces estimates of the output gap that are strongly at odds with widely-held beliefs about the amplitude, persistence, and even sign of transitory movements in...

We demonstrate how Bayesian shrinkage can address problems with utilizing large information sets to calculate trend and cycle via a multivariate Beveridge-Nelson (BN) decomposition. We illustrate our approach by estimating the U.S. output gap with large Bayesian vector autoregressions that...

This paper describes a fiscal database for Australia including measures of government spending, revenue, deficits, debt and various sub-aggregates as initially published and subsequently revised. The data vintages are collated from various sources and provide a comprehensive description of the...

The paper describes how to measure the fiscal multiplier using budget statements on planned government spending in the current and following years alongside the data on actual outcomes. The multiplier effects can be decomposed to distinguish the effects of ‘policy reactions' versus ‘policy...

An updated version of our Markov-switching model of U.S. real GDP clearly suggests the COVID-19 recession was more U shaped than L shaped. As with linear time series models, it is important to account for extreme outliers during the pandemic, but a simple decay function for volatility from...

We consider which labor market variables are the most informative for estimating and now-casting the U.S. output gap using a multivariate trend-cycle decomposition. Although the unemployment rate clearly contains important cyclical information, it also appears to reflect more persistent...