In this paper we study what professional forecasters predict. We use spectral analysis and state space modeling to decompose economic time series into a trend, business-cycle, and irregular component. To examine which components are captured by professional forecasters, we regress their...

In this paper we study what professional forecasters actually explain. We use spectral analysis and state space modeling to decompose economic time series into a trend, a business-cycle, and an irregular component. To examine which components are captured by professional forecasters we regress...

We study the forecasting of future realized volatility in the foreign exchange, stock, and bond markets from variables in the information set, including implied volatility backed out from option prices. Realized volatility is separated into its continuous and jump components, and the...

Recent developments allow a nonparametric separation of the continuous sample path component and the jump component of realized volatility. The jump component has very different time series properties than the continuous component, and accounting for this allows improved forecasting of future...

The standard way to summarize the yield curve is to use the first three principal components of the yield curve, resulting in level, slope and curvature factors. Yields, however, are non-stationary. We analyze the first three principal components of yield changes, which correspond to changes in...