We examine inventory adjustment in the U.S. manufacturing sector using quarterly rmlevel data over the period 1978{97. Our evidence indicates that the inventory investment process is nonlinear and asymmetric, results consistent with a nonconvex adjustment cost structure. The inventory adjustment process di ers over the business cycle: for a given level of excess inventories, rms disinvest more ...

The slope of the Treasury yield curve has often been cited as a leading economic indicator, with inversion of the curve being thought of as a harbinger of a recession. In this paper, I consider a number of probit models using the yield curve to forecast recessions. Models that use both the level of the federal funds rate and the term spread give better insample fit, and better out-of-sample pre...

Using a standard factor decomposition of a panel of forecasts, we have shown that the forecast uncertainty from the standpoint of a policy maker can be expressed as the disagreement among forecasters plus the perceived variability of common aggregate shocks. Thus, the uncertainty of the average forecast is not the variance of the average forecast but rather the average of the variances of the i...

Much research studies US inflation history with a trend-cycle model with unobserved components. A key feature of this model is that the trend may be viewed as the Fed’s evolving inflation target or long-horizon expected inflation. We provide a new way to measure the slowly evolving trend and the cycle (or inflation gap), based on forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. These fore...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper proposes a new way of computing a coincident indic...

This paper asks how well a general equilibrium agency cost model describes the dynamic relationship between credit variables and the business cycle. A Bayesian VAR is used to obtain probability intervals for empirical correlations. The agency cost model is found to predict the leading, countercyclical correlation of spreads with output when shocks arising from the credit market contribute to ou...