Macroeconomic Forecasting

The literature on economic forecasting has made great strides in the past ten to fifteen years. For example, new real-time databases have led to the development of new tools that can account for revisions to past data; dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models are increasingly being used to forecast; and diffusion indexes allow forecasters to incorporate the information in hundreds of series when producing forecasts. However, from a practical perspective, such innovations have not trickled-down into the toolboxes of most professional economists. When confronted with a practical forecasting problem, many of these tend to rely on simple approaches that they know and understand, such as vector autoregressions (VARs). Many existing forecasting texts are typically either beyond the scope of practitioners who simply wish to learn some of the latest tools or issues or are written at too introductory a level. In light of the above, this textbook aims to bridge the gap between the specialized forecasting literature and the ultimate producers of forecasts.