IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/gwc/wpaper/2011-004.html

The Forecasting Performance of Business Economists During the Great Recession

Author

Listed:
  • Kathryn Lundquist

    (George Washington University)

  • H.O. Stekler

    (George Washington University)

Abstract

It is generally believed that the recession of 2007-2009 was not foreseen by business economists. Is this perceived view accurate? We explore this issue by examining business economists’ published statements about economic conditions. We compare these qualitative forecasts with the Beige Book. We conclude that both sets of data are similar and that business economists are responsive to information about the economy and adjust their predictions quickly.

Suggested Citation

  • Kathryn Lundquist & H.O. Stekler, 2011. "The Forecasting Performance of Business Economists During the Great Recession," Working Papers 2011-004, The George Washington University, The Center for Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:gwc:wpaper:2011-004
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www2.gwu.edu/~forcpgm/2011-004.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2011
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Nathan S. Balke & Mine K. Yücel, 2000. "Evaluating the Eleventh District's Beige Book," Economic and Financial Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, issue Q IV, pages 2-10.
    2. Michelle T. Armesto & Rubén Hernández‐Murillo & Michael T. Owyang & Jeremy Piger, 2009. "Measuring the Information Content of the Beige Book: A Mixed Data Sampling Approach," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 41(1), pages 35-55, February.
    3. Balke, Nathan S & Petersen, D'Ann, 2002. "How Well Does the Beige Book Reflect Economic Activity? Evaluating Qualitative Information Quantitatively," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 34(1), pages 114-136, February.
    4. Robert Goldfarb & H. O. Stekler & Joel David, 2005. "Methodological issues in forecasting: Insights from the egregious business forecast errors of late 1930," Journal of Economic Methodology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(4), pages 517-542.
    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. Chauvet, Marcelle & Potter, Simon, 2013. "Forecasting Output," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 141-194, Elsevier.

    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. Herman O. Stekler & Hilary Symington, 2014. "How Did The Fomc View The Great Recession As It Was Happening?: Evaluating The Minutes From Fomc Meetings, 2006-2010," Working Papers 2014-005, The George Washington University, The Center for Economic Research.
    2. Stekler, Herman & Symington, Hilary, 2016. "Evaluating qualitative forecasts: The FOMC minutes, 2006–2010," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 559-570.
    3. Bespalova, Olga, 2018. "Forecast Evaluation in Macroeconomics and International Finance. Ph.D. thesis, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA," MPRA Paper 117706, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Madeline Zavodny & Donna K. Ginther, 2005. "Does the Beige Book Move Financial Markets?," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 72(1), pages 138-151, July.
    5. Huang, Yu-Lieh & Kuan, Chung-Ming, 2021. "Economic prediction with the FOMC minutes: An application of text mining," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 751-761.
    6. Michelle T. Armesto & Ruben Hernandez-Murillo & Michael T. Owyang & Jeremy M. Piger, 2007. "Identifying asymmetry in the language of the Beige Book: a mixed data sampling approach," Working Papers 2007-010, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    7. Mathy, Gabriel & Stekler, Herman, 2017. "Expectations and forecasting during the Great Depression: Real-time evidence from the business press," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 1-15.
    8. Bespalova, Olga, 2020. "GDP forecasts: Informational asymmetry of the SPF and FOMC minutes," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 1531-1540.
    9. Asutay, Mehmet & Chien, Wen Che, 2026. "The impact of FOMC monetary policy reports on the forecasts of Taiwan's economic variables: Sentiment analysis through text mining," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 109(C).
    10. Luca Barbaglia & Sergio Consoli & Sebastiano Manzan & Luca Tiozzo Pezzoli & Elisa Tosetti, 2025. "Sentiment analysis of economic text: A lexicon‐based approach," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 63(1), pages 125-143, January.
    11. Sadique, Shibley & In, Francis & Veeraraghavan, Madhu & Wachtel, Paul, 2013. "Soft information and economic activity: Evidence from the Beige Book," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 81-92.
    12. Weber, Christoph S., 2019. "The effect of central bank transparency on exchange rate volatility," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 165-181.
    13. repec:fip:fedcwq:98080 is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Amrendra Pandey & Jagadish Shettigar & Amarnath Bose, 2021. "Evaluation of the Inflation Forecasting Process of the Reserve Bank of India: A Text Analysis Approach," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(3), pages 21582440211, July.
    15. Donna K. Ginther & Madeline Zavodny, 2001. "The Beige Book: Timely information on the regional economy," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, vol. 86(Q3), pages 19-29.
    16. Gabriel Mathy & Herman Stekler, 2018. "Was the deflation of the depression anticipated? An inference using real-time data," Journal of Economic Methodology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(2), pages 117-125, April.
    17. Messina, Jeffrey D. & Sinclair, Tara M. & Stekler, Herman, 2015. "What can we learn from revisions to the Greenbook forecasts?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 54-62.
    18. Christoph S. Weber, 2026. "Central Bank Transparency and Interest Rate Volatility," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(1), pages 1156-1168, January.
    19. Müller, Karsten, 2020. "German forecasters' narratives: How informative are German business cycle forecast reports?," Working Papers 23, German Research Foundation's Priority Programme 1859 "Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour", Humboldt University Berlin.
    20. Santiago Etchegaray Alvarez, 2022. "Proyecciones macroeconómicas con datos en frecuencias mixtas. Modelos ADL-MIDAS, U-MIDAS y TF-MIDAS con aplicaciones para Uruguay," Documentos de trabajo 2022004, Banco Central del Uruguay.
    21. John R. Graham & Campbell R. Harvey & Manish Jha, 2026. "CFOs Meet LLMs," Papers 2606.13812, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    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:gwc:wpaper:2011-004. 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: GW Economics Department (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/pfgwuus.html .

    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.