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Working Paper
The Near-Term Forward Yield Spread as a Leading Indicator : A Less Distorted Mirror
The spread between the yield on a 10-year Treasury bond and the yield on a shorter maturity bond, such as a 2-year Treasury, is commonly used as an indicator for predicting U.S. recessions. We show that such ?long-term spreads? are statistically dominated in recession prediction models by an economically more intuitive alternative, a ""near-term forward spread."" This latter spread can be interpreted as a measure of the market's expectations for the near-term trajectory of conventional monetary policy rates. The predictive power of our near-term forward spread indicates that, when market ...
Journal Article
Modeling Professional Recession Forecasts
Professional forecasters use a wealth of information, including their own experience, to predict economic variables. But can a few publicly available series replicate their recession forecasts?
Working Paper
Why Does the Yield-Curve Slope Predict Recessions?
Why is an inverted yield-curve slope such a powerful predictor of future recessions? We show that a decomposition of the yield curve slope into its expectations and risk premia components helps disentangle the channels that connect fluctuations in Treasury rates and the future state of the economy. In particular, a change in the yield curve slope due to a monetary policy easing, measured by the current real-interest rate level and its expected path, is associated with an increase in the probability of a future recession within the next year. In contrast, a decrease in risk premia is ...
Can Economists Predict Recessions?
An analysis of 55 years of data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters suggests that quarter-ahead recession forecasts are fairly accurate but still have a great deal of uncertainty.
Working Paper
The continuing power of the yield spread in forecasting recessions
In this paper, we replicate the main results of Rudebusch and Williams (2009), who show that the use of the yield spread in a probit model can predict recessions better than the Survey of Professional Forecasters. We investigate the robustness of their results in several ways: extending the sample to include the 2007-09 recession, changing the starting date of the sample, changing the ending date of the sample, using rolling windows of data instead of just an expanding sample, and using alternative measures of the actual" value of real output. Our results show that the Rudebusch-Williams ...