The Unassuming Economist

New article by John Cochrane from John Cochrane’s blog.

“Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, passes along the above gorgeous graph. Fed forecasts of interest rates behave similarly. So does the “market forecast” embedded in the yield curve, which usually slopes upward.
Torsten’s conclusion:

The forecasting track record of the economics profession when it comes to 10-year interest rates is not particularly impressive, see chart [above]. Since the Philadelphia Fed started their Survey of Professional Forecasters twenty years ago, the economists and strategists participating have been systematically wrong, predicting that long rates would move higher. Their latest release has the same prediction.

Well. Like the famous broken clock that is right twice a day, note the forecasts are “right” in times of higher rates. So don’t necessarily run out and buy bonds today.

Can it possibly be true that professional forecasters are simply behaviorally dumb, refuse to learn, and the institutions that hire them refuse to hire more rational ones?”

To read more click here.

New post from livewire by JOEY MUI of Merlon Capital

“The problem with precision

Most forecasts begin with a starting point which is often anchored to current data. Forecasters tend to modestly extrapolate up or down from this level. This tendency to stick close to current conditions, or consensus views, limits a forecaster’s ability to comprehend the full range of possibilities or the impacts of more extreme circumstances.

Research by the International Monetary Fund explored the ability of economists to predict recessions between 1992 to 2014. It was a disaster. Economists consistently failed to predict a recession in GDP by a significant margin. Even as conditions deteriorated, economists stubbornly anchored their forecasts to the preceding non-recessionary period and adjusted their predictions downwards too little, too late.”

Click here to read more.

New paper by Olivier Sprangers, Sebastian Schelter & Maartende Rijke

Abstract:

Probabilistic time series forecasting is crucial in many application domains, such as retail, ecommerce, finance, and biology. With the increasing availability of large volumes of data, a number of neural architectures have been proposed for this problem. In particular, Transformer-based methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on real-world benchmarks. However, these methods require a large number of parameters to be learned, which imposes high memory requirements on the computational resources for training such models. To address this problem, we introduce a novel bidirectional temporal convolutional network that requires an order of magnitude fewer parameters than a common Transformer-based approach. Our model combines two temporal convolutional networks: the first network encodes future covariates of the time series, whereas the second network encodes past observations and covariates. We jointly estimate the parameters of an output distribution via these two networks. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that our method performs on par with four state-of-the-art probabilistic forecasting methods, including a Transformer-based approach and WaveNet, on two point metrics (sMAPE and NRMSE) as well as on a set of range metrics (quantile loss percentiles) in the majority of cases. We also demonstrate that our method requires significantly fewer parameters than Transformer-based methods, which means that the model can be trained faster with significantly lower memory requirements, which as a consequence reduces the infrastructure cost for deploying these models.

Read more here.

By Paul Beaudry & Tim Willems in AEJ: Macroeconomics

Abstract – Analyzing International Monetary Fund (IMF) data, we find that overly optimistic growth expectations for a country induce economic contractions a few years later. To isolate the causal effect, we take an instrumental variable approach—exploiting randomness in the country allocation of IMF mission chiefs. We first document that IMF mission chiefs differ in their individual degrees of forecast optimism, yielding quasi-experimental variation in the degree of forecast optimism at the country level. The mechanism appears to run through excessive accumulation of debt (public and private). Our findings illustrate the potency of unjustified optimism and underline the importance of basing economic forecasts upon realistic medium-term prospects.

Read more here.

By Philip Hans Franses and Max Welz

“This paper deals with forecasting low-frequency macroeconomic variables, when data
are available for a reasonably large number of countries or states. As many macroeconomic
variables have a stochastic trend, the forecasting methodology also addresses potentially
common stochastic trends. In this paper the particular focus is on forecasting annual real
GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth rates in Africa.”

To read more click here.