Global growth prospects have deteriorated significantly since the beginning of the year, raising the specter of global recession. This paper relies on insights gleaned from previous global recessions to analyze the recent evolution of economic activity and policies and presents plausible...

We evaluate the forecasting performance of six different models for short-term forecasting of Macedonian GDP: 1) ARIMA model; 2) AR model estimated by the Kalman filter; 3) model that explains Macedonian GDP as a function of the foreign demand; 4) small structural model that links GDP components...

Using a unique dataset of 22.5 million news articles from the Dow Jones Newswires Archive, we perform an in depth real-time out-of-sample forecasting comparison study with one of the most widely used data sets in the newer forecasting literature, namely the FRED-MD dataset. Focusing on U.S. GDP,...

This paper assesses to what extent forecasters make effcient use of competitors' forecasts. Usinga panel of forecasters, I find that forecasters underuse information from their competitors in their forecasts for current and next year's annual GDP growth and inflation. The results also show that...

Macroeconomic crises are common as well as economically, socially and politically costly. Fiscal policy plays an important role in alleviating the costs of the crisis. However, recent experiences suggest that the public finances often are unprepared for a crisis. Deficits and debt levels prior...

We build a small structural open economy model, augmented to depict the credit market and interest rate spreads (distinguishing by credit to firms and families); monetary policy with sterilized intervention in the foreign exchange market; and macroprudential policy as capital requirements. We...

Macroeconomists and political officers need rigorous, albeit realistic, quantitative models to forecast the future paths and dynamics of some variables of interest while being able to evaluate the effects of alternative scenarios. At the heart of all these models lies a standard macroeconomic...

Following the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-9, there has been a shift in mainstream economic policy modeling toward "realism," with dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models partly diverging from the representative agent framework, and large-scale, New-Keynesian structural models...

When a policymaker is better informed than the public, public beliefs about the hidden informationemerge as additional state variables, managed by the policymaker. General methodsare presented to compute optimal commitment and discretion policies.Under commitment, policy is additive in two...

Monetary policy is most effective when public beliefs about future policies are activelymanaged. This is the appeal of policy rules and commitment strategies, typically absent underdiscretion. But when a policymaker has some private information — as is the case in reality— belief management...