Conventional VAR estimation and forecasting ignores the fact that economic data are often subject to revision many months or years after their initial release. This paper shows how VAR analysis can be modified to account for such revisions. The proposed approach assumes that government...

We undertake a real-time VAR analysis of the usefulness of the term spread, the junk-bond spread, the ISM's New Orders Index, and broker/dealer equity for predicting growth in non-farm employment. To get around the "apples and oranges" problem described by Koenig, Dolmas and Piger (2003), we...

We show that Howrey’s method for producing economic forecasts when data are subject to revision is easily generalized to handle the case where data are produced by a sophisticated statistical agency. The proposed approach assumes that government estimates are efficient with a finite lag. It...

We show that Howrey’s method for producing economic forecasts when data are subject to revision is easily generalized to handle the case where data are produced by a sophisticated statistical agency. The proposed approach assumes that government estimates are efficient with a finite lag. It...

This paper analyzes the performance of central banks in 27 inflation targeting countries by examining their success in achieving their explicit inflation targets. For this purpose, we decompose the inflation gap, the difference between actual inflation and inflation target, into predictable and...

This paper seeks to answer two questions in the context of the Indian economy. First, are all movements in food and energy prices transitory? Second, is there a significant relationship between permanent and transitory shocks to different components of the aggregate price level? Using monthly...

This paper uses an unobserved component model with heteroskedastic disturbances based on Harvey et al. (1992) to measure the time-varying importance of permanent and transitory components in the U.S. house prices. Our findings show that the cyclical component in the U.S. housing market is highly...

This paper proposes a modified present-value model that takes into account the fact that movements in the price-rent ratio for housing may not be mean-reverting. Our approach decomposes the price-rent ratio into expected real rent growth, expected housing return and a non-present-value (NPV)...