Recent research has proposed the state space (88) framework for decomposition of GNP and other economic time series into trend and cycle components, using the Kalman filter. This paper reviews the empirical evidence and suggests that the resulting decomposition may be spurious, just as...

We establish that the recursive, state-space methods of Kalman filtering and smoothing can be used to implement the Doan, Litterman, and Sims (1983) approach to econometric forecast and policy evaluation. Compared with the methods outlined in Doan, Litterman, and Sims, the Kalman algorithms are...

This paper considers the problem of forecasting a collection of short time series using cross sectional information in panel data. We construct point predictors using Tweedie's formula for the posterior mean of heterogeneous coefficients under a correlated random effects distribution. This...

Using research designs patterned after randomized experiments, many recent economic studies examine outcome measures for treatment groups and comparison groups that are not randomly assigned. By using variation in explanatory variables generated by changes in state laws, government draft...

We study the usefulness of root tests as diagnostic tools for selecting forecasting models. Difference stationary and trend stationary models of economic and financial time series often imply very different predictions, so deciding which model to use is tremendously important for applied...

We compare the out-of-sample forecasting performance of univariate homoskedastic, GARCH, autoregressive and nonparametric models for conditional variances, using five bilateral weekly exchange rates for the dollar, 1973-1989. For a one week horizon, GARCH models tend to make slightly more...

Lagged GNP growth rates are poor forecasts of future GNP growth rates in postwar US data, leading to the impression that GNP is nearly a random walk. However, other variables, and especially the lagged consumption/GNP ratio, do forecast long-horizon GNP growth, and show that GNP has temporary...

Exchange rate forecasts are generated using some popular monetary models of exchange rates in conjunction with several estimation techniques. We propose an alternative set of criteria for evaluating forecast rationality which entails the following requirements: the forecast and the actual series...

An appropriate metric for the success of an algorithm to forecast the variance of the rate of return on a capital asset could be the incremental profit from substituting it for the next best alternative. We propose a framework to assess incremental profits for competing algorithms to forecast...

This paper develops a vector autoregression (VAR) for time series which are observed at mixed frequencies - quarterly and monthly. The model is cast in state-space form and estimated with Bayesian methods under a Minnesota-style prior. We show how to evaluate the marginal data density to...