Overview

Economies evolve and are subject to sudden shifts precipitated by legislative changes, economic policy, major discoveries and political turmoil. Macroeconometric models are a very imperfect tool for forecasting this highly complicated and changing process. Ignoring these factors leads to a wide discrepancy between theory and practice. In their second book on economic forecasting, Michael P. Clements and David F. Hendry ask why some practices seem to work empirically despite a lack of formal support from theory. After reviewing the conventional approach to economic forecasting, they look at the implications for causal modelling, present a taxonomy of forecast errors, and delineate the sources of forecast failure. They show that forecast-period shifts in deterministic factors -interacting with model misspecification, collinearity and inconsistent estimation - are the dominant source of systematic failure. They then consider various approaches for avoiding systematic forecasting errors, including intercept corrections, differencing, co-breaking and modelling regime shifts; they emphasize the distinction between equilibrium correction (based on cointegration) and error correction (automatically offsetting past errors). Finally, they present three applications to test the implications of their framework. Their results on forecasting have wider implications for the conduct of empirical econometric research, model formulation, the testing of economic hypotheses and model-based policy analyses.

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9780262531894

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Reviews

"""Clements and Hendry provide an important service by systematically isolating and analyzing various potential sources of forecast error in econometric models used in forecasting....This book takes important steps toward closing the gap between the theory and practice of macroeconomic forecasting."" - John Robertson, The Economic Journal"""

Clements and Hendry provide an important service by systematically isolating and analyzing various potential sources of forecast error in econometric models used in forecasting....This book takes important steps toward closing the gap between the theory and practice of macroeconomic forecasting. - John Robertson, The Economic Journal

Author Information

Michael P. Clements is Research Fellow in Economics at the University of Warwick, UK. David F. Hendry is the Leverhulme Personal Research Professor of Economics and Fellow of Nuffield College at Oxford University, UK.

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