If economic growth slows in the United States in 2008, it will primarily be because of factors already present: a slumping housing market, high energy costs, and turbulence in worldwide financial markets.

Three ferocious hurricanes in 2005 failed to dampen the country’s economic momentum, and disruptions to the nation’s oil and natural gas supply created only temporary shocks.

Models used for policy analysis should generate reliable unconditional forecasts as well as policy simulations (conditional forecasts) that are based on a structural model of the economy. Vector autoregression (VAR) models have been criticized for having inaccurate forecasts as well as being...

Constructing forecasts of the future path for economic series such as real gross domestic product growth, inflation, and unemployment forms a large part of applied economic analysis for business and government. Model-based forecasts are easier to replicate and validate by independent researchers...

Vector autoregression (VAR) models are widely used for policy analysis. Some authors caution, however, that the forecast errors of the federal funds rate from such a VAR are large compared to those from the federal funds futures market. From these findings, it is argued that the inaccurate...

The paper describes a relative entropy procedure for imposing moment restrictions on simulated forecast distributions from a variety of models. Starting from an empirical forecast distribution for some variables of interest, the technique generates a new empirical distribution that satisfies a...

The data on economic variables are usually estimates, and these estimates may be revised many times after their initial publication. Most historical forecast evaluation exercises use the "latest available" or most recently revised vintage of historical data when constructing the forecasts-that...

This paper reports the results of a study of the characteristics and direct employment impact of high-growth firms operating in Georgia. The longitudinal data used in this study are from the National Establishment Time-Series (NETS) database. Using a standard definition of high employment growth...