While the yield spread has long been recognized as a good predictor of recessions, it seems to have been largely overlooked by professional forecasters. We examine this puzzle, established by Rudebusch and Williams (2009), in a data-rich environment including not just the yield spread but many...

While the yield spread has long been recognized as a good predictor of recessions, it seems to have been largely overlooked by professional forecasters. We examine this puzzle, established by Rudebusch and Williams (2009), in a data-rich environment including not just the yield spread but many...

This paper focuses on a number of newly proposed on-line forecast combination algorithms in Sancetta (2010), Yang (2004), and Wei and Yang (2012). We first establish certain asymptotic properties of these algorithms and compare them with the Bates and Granger (1969) method. We then show that...

We combine the probability forecasts of a real GDP decline from the U.S. Survey of Professional Forecasters, after trimming the forecasts that do not have “value” as measured by the Kuiper Skill Score and in the sense of Merton (1981). For this purpose, we use a simple test to evaluate the...

While the yield spread has long been recognized as a good predictor of recessions, it seems to have been largely overlooked by professional forecasters. We examine this puzzle, established by Rudebusch and Williams (2009), in a data-rich environment including not just the yield spread but many...