The Great Recession has challenged the adequacy of existing models to explain key macroeconomic data, and raised the concern that the models might be misspecified. This paper investigates the importance of misspecification in structural models using a novel approach to detect and identify the...

We propose new indices to measure macroeconomic uncertainty. The indices measure how unexpected a realization of a representative macroeconomic variable is relative to the unconditional forecast error distribution. We use forecast error distributions based on the nowcasts and forecasts of the...

This review provides an overview of forecasting methods that can help researchers forecast in the presence of non-stationarities caused by instabilities. The emphasis of the review is both theoretical and applied, and provides several examples of interest to economists. We show that modeling...

This paper studies stylized empirical facts regarding the effects of unexpected changes in aggregate macroeconomic policies on consumers that are allowed to differ depending on their individual characteristics. In particular, we focus on fiscal shocks due to their important effects on consumers'...

This paper studies the dynamic relationship between exchange rate fluctuations and world commodity price movements. Taking into account parameter instability, we demonstrate surprisingly robust evidence that exchange rates predict world commodity price movements, both in-sample and...

Recently, it has been suggested that macroeconomic forecasts from estimated DSGE models tend to be more accurate out-of-sample than random walk forecasts or Bayesian VAR forecasts. Del Negro and Schorfheide(2013) in particular suggest that the DSGE model forecast should become the benchmark for...

While forecasting is a common practice in academia, government and business alike, practitioners are often left wondering how to choose the sample for estimating forecasting models. When we forecast inflation in 2014, for example, should we use the last 30 years of data or the last 10 years of...

In this paper we propose empirical methods for detecting and identifying misspecifications in DSGE models. We introduce wedges in a DSGE model and identify potential misspecification via forecast error variance decomposition (FEVD) and marginal likelihood analyses. Our simulation results based...

This paper studies stylized empirical facts regarding the effects of unexpected changes in aggregate macroeconomic fiscal policies on consumers that are allowed to differ depending on their individual characteristics. We use data from the Consumption Expenditure Survey (CEX) to estimate...

The main goal of this article is to provide an answer to the question: "Does anything forecast exchange rates, and if so, which variables?". It is well known that exchange rate fluctuations are very difficult to predict using economic models, and that a random walk forecasts exchange rates...