We study the welfare cost of inflation in a general equilibrium life cycle model with growth, costly financial intermediation, and taxes on nominal quantities. We find a stationary equilibrium of the model matches a wide variety of facts about the postwar U.S. economy. We then calculate that the...

This paper argues that inferring long-horizon asset-return predictability from the properties of vector autoregressive (VAR) models on relatively short spans of data is potentially unreliable. We illustrate the problems that can arise by re-examining the findings of Bekaert and Hodrick (1992),...

As part of the Fed's daily operating procedure, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Board of Governors, and the Treasury make a forecast of that day's Treasury balance at the Fed. These forecasts are an integral part of the Fed's daily operating procedure. Errors in these forecasts can...

We construct a parsimonious model of the U.S. macro economy using a state space representation and recursive estimation. At the core of the estimation procedure is a prediction/correction algorithm based on a recursive least squares estimation with exponential forgetting. The algorithm is a...

We distinguish between three different ways of using real-time data to estimate forecasting equations and argue that the most popular approach should generally be avoided. The point is illustrated with a model that uses monthly industrial production, employment, and retail sales data to predict...

This paper develops a flexible approach to combine forecasts of future spot rates with forecasts from time-series models or macroeconomic variables. We find empirical evidence that accounting for both regimes in interest rate dynamics and combining forecasts from different models helps improve...

Studies of the predictive ability of the Federal Reserve's Beige Book, an anecdotal measure of regional economic conditions, for aggregate output and employment have proven inconclusive. This might be attributed, in part, to the irregular release schedule of the Beige Book. In this paper, we use...

The rapid increase in U.S. economic growth during the late 1990s inspired speculation that an acceleration in the rate of technological progress had given rise to an increase in potential output growth. This paper considers the transition dynamics associated with such a change using a general...

Consistent with findings in other markets, implied volatility is a biased predictor of the realized volatility of gold futures. No existing explanation—including a price of volatility risk—can completely explain the bias, but much of this apparent bias can be explained by persistence and...

This paper merges the literature on technical trading rules with the literature on Markov switching to develop economically useful trading rules. The Markov models' out-of sample, excess returns modestly exceed those of standard technical rules and are profitable over the most recent subsample....