IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/intfor/v38y2022i2p545-566.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Boosting tax revenues with mixed-frequency data in the aftermath of COVID-19: The case of New York

Author

Listed:
  • Lahiri, Kajal
  • Yang, Cheng

Abstract

We forecast New York state tax revenues with a mixed-frequency model using several machine learning techniques. We found that boosting with two dynamic factors extracted from a select list of New York and U.S. leading indicators did best to correctly update revenues for the fiscal year in direct multi-step out-of-sample forecasts. These forecasts were found to be informationally efficient over 18 monthly horizons. In addition to boosting with factors, we also studied the advisability of restricting boosting to select the most recent macro variables to capture abrupt structural changes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic upended all government budgets, our boosted forecasts were used to monitor revenues in real-time for the fiscal year 2021. Our estimates showed a drastic year-over-year decline in actual revenues by over 16% in May 2020, followed by several upward nowcast revisions that led to a recovery of −1% in March 2021, which was close to the actual annual value of −1.6%.

Suggested Citation

  • Lahiri, Kajal & Yang, Cheng, 2022. "Boosting tax revenues with mixed-frequency data in the aftermath of COVID-19: The case of New York," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(2), pages 545-566.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:intfor:v:38:y:2022:i:2:p:545-566
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2021.10.005
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169207021001680
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2021.10.005?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde & Charles I. Jones, 2020. "Macroeconomic Outcomes and COVID-19: A Progress Report," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 51(3 (Fall)), pages 111-166.
    2. Bo Zhao, 2020. "Forecasting the New England States’ Tax Revenues in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic," Current Policy Perspectives 88356, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    3. Michael W. McCracken & Joseph T. McGillicuddy, 2019. "An empirical investigation of direct and iterated multistep conditional forecasts," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 34(2), pages 181-204, March.
    4. Jeffrey Clemens & Stan Veuger, 2020. "Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic for State Government Tax Revenues," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 73(3), pages 619-644, September.
    5. Stylianos Asimakopoulos & Joan Paredes & Thomas Warmedinger, 2020. "Real‐Time Fiscal Forecasting Using Mixed‐Frequency Data," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 122(1), pages 369-390, January.
    6. Jushan Bai & Serena Ng, 2002. "Determining the Number of Factors in Approximate Factor Models," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(1), pages 191-221, January.
    7. Klaus Wohlrabe & Teresa Buchen, 2014. "Assessing the Macroeconomic Forecasting Performance of Boosting: Evidence for the United States, the Euro Area and Germany," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(4), pages 231-242, July.
    8. Andrii Babii & Eric Ghysels & Jonas Striaukas, 2022. "Machine Learning Time Series Regressions With an Application to Nowcasting," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(3), pages 1094-1106, June.
    9. Jeffrey Frankel, 2011. "Over-optimism in forecasts by official budget agencies and its implications," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 27(4), pages 536-562.
    10. Serena Ng, 2014. "Viewpoint: Boosting Recessions," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 47(1), pages 1-34, February.
    11. Ben Taieb, Souhaib & Hyndman, Rob J., 2014. "A gradient boosting approach to the Kaggle load forecasting competition," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 382-394.
    12. Buhlmann P. & Yu B., 2003. "Boosting With the L2 Loss: Regression and Classification," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 98, pages 324-339, January.
    13. Diebold, Francis X & Mariano, Roberto S, 2002. "Comparing Predictive Accuracy," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(1), pages 134-144, January.
    14. Ghysels, Eric & Ozkan, Nazire, 2015. "Real-time forecasting of the US federal government budget: A simple mixed frequency data regression approach," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 1009-1020.
    15. Megna, Robert & Xu, Qiang, 2003. "Forecasting the New York State economy: The coincident and leading indicators approach," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 701-713.
    16. Makridis, Christos & McNab, Robert, 2020. "The Fiscal Cost of COVID-19: Evidence from the States," Working Papers 10702, George Mason University, Mercatus Center.
    17. Onorante, Luca & Pedregal, Diego J. & Pérez, Javier J. & Signorini, Sara, 2010. "The usefulness of infra-annual government cash budgetary data for fiscal forecasting in the euro area," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 98-119, January.
    18. repec:aei:rpaper:1008570714 is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Steven Lehrer & Tian Xie & Tao Zeng, 2021. "Does High-Frequency Social Media Data Improve Forecasts of Low-Frequency Consumer Confidence Measures? [Regression Models with Mixed Sampling Frequencies]," Journal of Financial Econometrics, Oxford University Press, vol. 19(5), pages 910-933.
    20. Elena Andreou & Eric Ghysels & Andros Kourtellos, 2013. "Should Macroeconomic Forecasters Use Daily Financial Data and How?," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(2), pages 240-251, April.
    21. Baicker, Katherine & Clemens, Jeffrey & Singhal, Monica, 2012. "The rise of the states: U.S. fiscal decentralization in the postwar period," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(11), pages 1079-1091.
    22. Nordhaus, William D, 1987. "Forecasting Efficiency: Concepts and Applications," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 69(4), pages 667-674, November.
    23. Eric Ghysels & Arthur Sinko & Rossen Valkanov, 2007. "MIDAS Regressions: Further Results and New Directions," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(1), pages 53-90.
    24. Jonathan Iworiso & Spyridon Vrontos, 2020. "On the directional predictability of equity premium using machine learning techniques," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 39(3), pages 449-469, April.
    25. Pedregal, Diego J. & Pérez, Javier J., 2010. "Should quarterly government finance statistics be used for fiscal surveillance in Europe?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 26(4), pages 794-807, October.
    26. Benjamin Hofner & Andreas Mayr & Nikolay Robinzonov & Matthias Schmid, 2014. "Model-based boosting in R: a hands-on tutorial using the R package mboost," Computational Statistics, Springer, vol. 29(1), pages 3-35, February.
    27. Ghysels, Eric & Kvedaras, Virmantas & Zemlys, Vaidotas, 2016. "Mixed Frequency Data Sampling Regression Models: The R Package midasr," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 72(i04).
    28. Davig, Troy & Hall, Aaron Smalter, 2019. "Recession forecasting using Bayesian classification," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 848-867.
    29. Sydney C. Ludvigson & Sai Ma & Serena Ng, 2021. "COVID-19 and the Costs of Deadly Disasters," AEA Papers and Proceedings, American Economic Association, vol. 111, pages 366-370, May.
    30. Krol, Robert, 2013. "Evaluating state revenue forecasting under a flexible loss function," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 29(2), pages 282-289.
    31. Daniel Lewis & Karel Mertens & James H. Stock, 2020. "U.S. Economic Activity During the Early Weeks of the SARS-Cov-2 Outbreak," NBER Working Papers 26954, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    32. Döpke, Jörg & Fritsche, Ulrich & Pierdzioch, Christian, 2017. "Predicting recessions with boosted regression trees," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 745-759.
    33. Claudia Foroni & Massimiliano Marcellino & Christian Schumacher, 2015. "Unrestricted mixed data sampling (MIDAS): MIDAS regressions with unrestricted lag polynomials," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 178(1), pages 57-82, January.
    34. Marta Bańbura & Michele Modugno, 2014. "Maximum Likelihood Estimation Of Factor Models On Datasets With Arbitrary Pattern Of Missing Data," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(1), pages 133-160, January.
    35. Jushan Bai & Serena Ng, 2009. "Boosting diffusion indices," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 24(4), pages 607-629.
    36. John E. Anderson & Shafiun N. Shimul, 2018. "State and Local Property, Income, and Sales Tax Elasticity: Estimates from Dynamic Heterogeneous Panels," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 71(3), pages 521-546, September.
    37. Paredes, Joan & Pedregal, Diego J. & Pérez, Javier J., 2014. "Fiscal policy analysis in the euro area: Expanding the toolkit," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 36(5), pages 800-823.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrii Babii & Eric Ghysels & Jonas Striaukas, 2023. "Econometrics of Machine Learning Methods in Economic Forecasting," Papers 2308.10993, arXiv.org.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sarun Kamolthip, 2021. "Macroeconomic Forecasting with LSTM and Mixed Frequency Time Series Data," PIER Discussion Papers 165, Puey Ungphakorn Institute for Economic Research.
    2. Mogliani, Matteo & Simoni, Anna, 2021. "Bayesian MIDAS penalized regressions: Estimation, selection, and prediction," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 222(1), pages 833-860.
    3. Wolfgang Nierhaus & Timo Wollmershäuser, 2016. "ifo Konjunkturumfragen und Konjunkturanalyse: Band II," ifo Forschungsberichte, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, number 72, October.
    4. Babii, Andrii & Ball, Ryan T. & Ghysels, Eric & Striaukas, Jonas, 2023. "Machine learning panel data regressions with heavy-tailed dependent data: Theory and application," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 237(2).
    5. Ballarin, Giovanni & Dellaportas, Petros & Grigoryeva, Lyudmila & Hirt, Marcel & van Huellen, Sophie & Ortega, Juan-Pablo, 2024. "Reservoir computing for macroeconomic forecasting with mixed-frequency data," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 40(3), pages 1206-1237.
    6. Konstantin Kuck & Karsten Schweikert, 2021. "Forecasting Baden‐Württemberg's GDP growth: MIDAS regressions versus dynamic mixed‐frequency factor models," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(5), pages 861-882, August.
    7. Hanan Naser, 2015. "Estimating and forecasting Bahrain quarterly GDP growth using simple regression and factor-based methods," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 49(2), pages 449-479, September.
    8. Mahmut Gunay, 2020. "Nowcasting Turkish GDP with MIDAS: Role of Functional Form of the Lag Polynomial," Working Papers 2002, Research and Monetary Policy Department, Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey.
    9. Kyosuke Chikamatsu, Naohisa Hirakata, Yosuke Kido, Kazuki Otaka, 2018. "Nowcasting Japanese GDPs," Bank of Japan Working Paper Series 18-E-18, Bank of Japan.
    10. Petropoulos, Fotios & Apiletti, Daniele & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios & Babai, Mohamed Zied & Barrow, Devon K. & Ben Taieb, Souhaib & Bergmeir, Christoph & Bessa, Ricardo J. & Bijak, Jakub & Boylan, Joh, 2022. "Forecasting: theory and practice," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 705-871.
      • Fotios Petropoulos & Daniele Apiletti & Vassilios Assimakopoulos & Mohamed Zied Babai & Devon K. Barrow & Souhaib Ben Taieb & Christoph Bergmeir & Ricardo J. Bessa & Jakub Bijak & John E. Boylan & Jet, 2020. "Forecasting: theory and practice," Papers 2012.03854, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2022.
    11. Qian Chen & Xiang Gao & Shan Xie & Li Sun & Shuairu Tian & Shigeyuki Hamori, 2021. "On the Predictability of China Macro Indicator with Carbon Emissions Trading," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(5), pages 1-24, February.
    12. Zhang, Qin & Ni, He & Xu, Hao, 2023. "Nowcasting Chinese GDP in a data-rich environment: Lessons from machine learning algorithms," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 122(C).
    13. Wichitaksorn, Nuttanan, 2022. "Analyzing and forecasting Thai macroeconomic data using mixed-frequency approach," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    14. Smith Paul, 2016. "Nowcasting UK GDP during the depression," Working Papers 1606, University of Strathclyde Business School, Department of Economics.
    15. Knut Are Aastveit & Tuva Marie Fastbø & Eleonora Granziera & Kenneth Sæterhagen Paulsen & Kjersti Næss Torstensen, 2020. "Nowcasting Norwegian household consumption with debit card transaction data," Working Paper 2020/17, Norges Bank.
    16. Chikamatsu, Kyosuke & Hirakata, Naohisa & Kido, Yosuke & Otaka, Kazuki, 2021. "Mixed-frequency approaches to nowcasting GDP: An application to Japan," Japan and the World Economy, Elsevier, vol. 57(C).
    17. Philippe Goulet Coulombe & Maxime Leroux & Dalibor Stevanovic & Stéphane Surprenant, 2022. "How is machine learning useful for macroeconomic forecasting?," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 37(5), pages 920-964, August.
    18. Richard Schnorrenberger & Aishameriane Schmidt & Guilherme Valle Moura, 2024. "Harnessing Machine Learning for Real-Time Inflation Nowcasting," Working Papers 806, DNB.
    19. Caroline Jardet & Baptiste Meunier, 2022. "Nowcasting world GDP growth with high‐frequency data," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(6), pages 1181-1200, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Boosting; Tax revenue; Machine learning; MIDAS; Forecast efficiency; COVID-19 Pandemic; DMS forecasting;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C22 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Time-Series Models; Dynamic Quantile Regressions; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models; Diffusion Processes
    • C32 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Time-Series Models; Dynamic Quantile Regressions; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models; Diffusion Processes; State Space Models
    • C50 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - General
    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods
    • E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy; Modern Monetary Theory

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:intfor:v:38:y:2022:i:2:p:545-566. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ijforecast .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.