Recent studies document the deteriorating performance of forecasting models during the Great Moderation. This conversely implies that forecastability is higher in the preceding era, when the economy was unexpectedly volatile. We offer an explanation for this phenomenon in the context of...

Remarks given to a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and Cleveland, Dallas, Texas, May 24, 2007 ; "One of our main criticisms here at the Dallas Fed of much of the core inflation literature is that it lacks theoretical coherence. It reminds me of the time-honored saying...

Remarks before the New York Association for Business Economics, New York, November 2, 2006 ; "Globalization brings new influences into the Fed's navigation calculations to determine the best flight path for the U.S. economy. To determine that course...we must develop a better understanding of...

Ongoing economic globalization makes real-time international data increasingly relevant, though little work has been done on collecting and analyzing real-time data for economies other than the U.S. In this paper, we introduce and examine a new international real-time dataset assembled from...

This paper attacks the Meese-Rogoff (exchange rate disconnect) puzzle from a different perspective: out-of-sample interval forecasting. Most studies in the literature focus on point forecasts. In this paper, we apply Robust Semi-parametric (RS) interval forecasting to a group of Taylor rule...

Engel and West (EW, 2005) argue that as the discount factor gets closer to one, present-value asset pricing models place greater weight on future fundamentals. Consequently, current fundamentals have very weak forecasting power and exchange rates appear to follow approximately a random walk. We...

The class of Functional Signal plus Noise (FSN) models is introduced that provides a new, general method for modelling and forecasting time series of economic functions. The underlying, continuous economic function (or "signal") is a natural cubic spline whose dynamic evolution is driven by a...

The cross-section distribution of U.S. import prices exhibits some of the fat-tailed characteristics that are well documented for the cross-section distribution of U.S. consumer prices. This suggests that limited-influence estimators of core import price inflation might outperform headline or...