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...

Having a correct assessment of current business cycle conditions is one of the major challenges for monetary policy conduct. Given that GDP figures are available with a significant delay central banks are increasingly using Nowcasting as a useful tool for having an immediate perception of...

We develop metrics based on Shapley values for interpreting time-series forecasting models, including “black-box” models from machine learning. Our metrics are model agnostic, so that they are applicable to any model (linear or nonlinear, parametric or nonparametric). Two of the metrics,...

Macroeconomic expectations of various economic agents are characterized by substantial crosssectional heterogeneity. This chapter focuses on heterogeneity in the expectations among professional forecasters, first presenting stylized facts and discussing theoretical explanations for heterogeneous...