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Working Paper
The Accuracy of Forecasts Prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee
We analyze forecasts of consumption, nonresidential investment, residential investment, government spending, exports, imports, inventories, gross domestic product, inflation, and unemployment prepared by the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee from 1997 to 2008, called the Greenbooks. We compare the root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and the proportion of directional errors of Greenbook forecasts of these macroeconomic indicators to the errors from three forecasting benchmarks: a random walk, a first-order ...
Discussion Paper
The Chen-Tindall system and the lasso operator: improving automatic model performance
Using U.S. monthly macroeconomic data, the automatic model system presented in Chen and Tindall [2016] outperforms the lasso automatic system, but the lasso is improved where Bayesian model averaging is employed to combine its forecasts with those from autoregressive schemes. The best performance is obtained using Bayesian model averaging to combine the Chen?Tindall system, the lasso, and autoregressive schemes. Performance is virtually the same using this combined approach where the elastic-net operator is substituted for the lasso. Similar overall outcomes are found for France and Germany ...
Report
Real-time inflation forecasting in a changing world
This paper revisits the accuracy of inflation forecasting using activity and expectations variables. We apply Bayesian-model averaging across different regression specifications selected from a set of potential predictors that includes lagged values of inflation, a host of real activity data, term structure data, nominal data, and surveys. In this model average, we can entertain different channels of structural instability by incorporating stochastic breaks in the regression parameters of each individual specification within this average, allowing for breaks in the error variance of the ...
Report
Reexamining the consumption-wealth relationship: the role of model uncertainty
In their influential work on the consumption-wealth relationship, Lettau and Ludvigson found that while consumption responds to permanent changes in wealth in the expected manner, most changes in wealth are transitory with no effect on consumption. We investigate the robustness of these results to model uncertainty using Bayesian model averaging. We find that there is model uncertainty with regard to the number of cointegrating vectors, the form of deterministic components, lag length, and whether the cointegrating residuals affect consumption and income directly. Whether this uncertainty has ...