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Working Paper
Reconciled Estimates of Monthly GDP in the US
In the US, income and expenditure-side estimates of GDP (GDPI and GDPE) measure "true" GDP with error and are available at a quarterly frequency. Methods exist for using these proxies to produce reconciled quarterly estimates of true GDP. In this paper, we extend these methods to provide reconciled historical true GDP estimates at a monthly frequency. We do this using a Bayesian mixed frequency vector autoregression (MF-VAR) involving GDPE, GDPI, unobserved true GDP, and monthly indicators of short-term economic activity. Our MF-VAR imposes restrictions that reflect a measurement-error ...
Report
Recent changes in the U.S. business cycle
The U.S. business cycle expansion that started in March 1991 is the longest on record. This paper uses statistical techniques to examine whether this expansion is a onetime unique event or whether its length is a result of a change in the stability of the U.S. economy. Bayesian methods are used to estimate a common factor model that allows for structural breaks in the dynamics of a wide range of macroeconomic variables. We find strong evidence that a reduction in volatility is common to the series examined. Further, the reduction in volatility implies that future expansions will be ...
Working Paper
Incorporating Short Data into Large Mixed-Frequency VARs for Regional Nowcasting
Interest in regional economic issues coupled with advances in administrative data is driving the creation of new regional economic data. Many of these data series could be useful for nowcasting regional economic activity, but they suffer from a short (albeit constantly expanding) time series which makes incorporating them into nowcasting models problematic. Regional nowcasting is already challenging because the release delay on regional data tends to be greater than that at the national level, and "short" data imply a "ragged edge" at both the beginning and the end of regional data sets, ...
Working Paper
Using stochastic hierarchical aggregation constraints to nowcast regional economic aggregates
Recent decades have seen advances in using econometric methods to produce more timely and higher-frequency estimates of economic activity at the national level, enabling better tracking of the economy in real time. These advances have not generally been replicated at the sub–national level, likely because of the empirical challenges that nowcasting at a regional level presents, notably, the short time series of available data, changes in data frequency over time, and the hierarchical structure of the data. This paper develops a mixed– frequency Bayesian VAR model to address common ...
Working Paper
Real-Time Forecasting and Scenario Analysis using a Large Mixed-Frequency Bayesian VAR
We use a mixed-frequency vector autoregression to obtain intraquarter point and density forecasts as new, high frequency information becomes available. This model, delineated in Ghysels (2016), is specified at the lowest sampling frequency; high frequency observations are treated as different economic series occurring at the low frequency. As this type of data stacking results in a high-dimensional system, we rely on Bayesian shrinkage to mitigate parameter proliferation. We obtain high-frequency updates to forecasts by treating new data releases as conditioning information. The same ...
Working Paper
What Can the Data Tell Us About the Equilibrium Real Interest Rate?
The equilibrium real interest rate (r*) is the short-term real interest rate that, in the long run, is consistent with aggregate production at potential and stable inflation. Estimation of r* faces considerable econometric and empirical challenges. On the econometric front, classical inference confronts the "pile-up" problem. Empirically, the co-movement of output, inflation, unemployment, and real interest rates is too weak to yield precise estimates of r*. These challenges are addressed by applying Bayesian methods and examining the role of several "demand shifters", including asset ...
Working Paper
Escaping the Great Recession
We show that policy uncertainty about how the rising public debt will be stabilized accounts for the lack of deflation in the US economy at the zero lower bound. We first estimate a Markov-switching VAR to highlight that a zero-lower-bound regime captures most of the comovements during the Great Recession: a deep recession, no deflation, and large fiscal imbalances. We then show that a micro-founded model that features policy uncertainty accounts for these stylized facts. Finally, we highlight that policy uncertainty arises at the zero lower bound because of a trade-off between mitigating the ...
Working Paper
Financial Frictions, Financial Shocks, and Aggregate Volatility
I revisit the Great Inflation and the Great Moderation for nominal and real variables. I document an immoderation in corporate balance sheet variables so that the Great Moderation is best described as a period of divergent patterns in volatilities for real, nominal and financial variables. A model with time-varying financial frictions and financial shocks allowing for structural breaks in the size of shocks and the institutional framework is estimated. The paper shows that (i) while the Great Inflation was driven by bad luck, the Great Moderation was mostly due to better institutions; (ii) ...
Working Paper
Financial Nowcasts and Their Usefulness in Macroeconomic Forecasting
Financial data often contain information that is helpful for macroeconomic forecasting, while multistep forecast accuracy also benefits by incorporating good nowcasts of macroeconomic variables. This paper considers the role of nowcasts of financial variables in making conditional forecasts of real and nominal macroeconomic variables using standard quarterly Bayesian vector autoregressions (BVARs). For nowcasting the quarterly value of a variety of financial variables, we document that the average of the available daily data and a daily random walk forecast to fill in the missing days in the ...
Working Paper
Searching for Hysteresis