Blue Chip Economic Indicators is a monthly survey and associated publication by Wolters Kluwer collecting macroeconomic forecasts related to the economy of the United States. [1] The survey polls America's top business economists, collecting their forecasts of U.S. economic growth, inflation, interest rates, and a host of other critical indicators of future business activity. [1] It has a sister publication called Blue Chip Financial Forecasts, which surveys forecasts of the future direction and level of U.S. interest rates. [2]
Blue Chip Economic Indicators started in 1976. [1]
The Blue Chip Economic Indicators survey provides forecasts for this year and next from each panel member, plus and average, or consensus, of their forecasts for each of these variables associated with the economy of the United States: [1]
Many papers in the academic literature on the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts have used the Blue Chip Economic Indicators for a data set of forecasts whose accuracy is to be evaluated. [3] [4] A paper by Laster, Bennett, and Geoum (1999) made a theoretical argument for how rational forecasters with identical information and incentives may still come up with divergent forecasts to maximize their probability of winning, and used the Blue chip Economic Indicators data to provide evidence supportive of their model. The paper noted: "The publisher of Blue Chip Economic Indicators, a monthly newsletter compiling dozens of professional economic forecasts, holds an annual dinner at which the most accurate forecaster for the previous year is honored. The winning forecaster is also identified in later issues of the newsletter." [5]
The Congressional Budget Office has also cited Blue Chip Economic Indicators data in some of its publications. [6]
The results of the Blue Chip Economic Indicators have also been used to inform discussion in the financial press and blogs, including Forbes and Barron's . [7] [8] [9]
In March 2009, PolitiFact reported that a controversial statement made by Christina Romer based on Blue Chip Economic Indicators data had correctly cited the Blue Chip Economic Indicators. [10]
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics dealing with performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. For example, using interest rates, taxes, and government spending to regulate an economy’s growth and stability. This includes regional, national, and global economies. According to a 2018 assessment by economists Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson, economic "evidence regarding the consequences of different macroeconomic policies is still highly imperfect and open to serious criticism."
In economics, a recession is a business cycle contraction when there is a general decline in economic activity. Recessions generally occur when there is a widespread drop in spending. This may be triggered by various events, such as a financial crisis, an external trade shock, an adverse supply shock, the bursting of an economic bubble, or a large-scale anthropogenic or natural disaster. In the United States, it is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales". In the United Kingdom, it is defined as a negative economic growth for two consecutive quarters.
New Keynesian economics is a school of macroeconomics that strives to provide microeconomic foundations for Keynesian economics. It developed partly as a response to criticisms of Keynesian macroeconomics by adherents of new classical macroeconomics.
Business cycles are intervals of expansion followed by recession in economic activity. They have implications for the welfare of the broad population as well as for private institutions. Typically business cycles are measured by applying a band pass filter to a broad economic indicator such as Real Gross Domestic Production. Here important problems may arise with a commonly used filter called the "ideal filter". For instance if a series is a purely random process without any cycle, an "ideal" filter, better called a block filter, a spurious cycle is produced as output. Fortunately methods such as [Harvey and Trimbur, 2003, Review of Economics and Statistics] have been designed so that the band pass filter may be adapted to the time series at hand.
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Macroeconomic theory has its origins in the study of business cycles and monetary theory. In general, early theorists believed monetary factors could not affect real factors such as real output. John Maynard Keynes attacked some of these "classical" theories and produced a general theory that described the whole economy in terms of aggregates rather than individual, microeconomic parts. Attempting to explain unemployment and recessions, he noticed the tendency for people and businesses to hoard cash and avoid investment during a recession. He argued that this invalidated the assumptions of classical economists who thought that markets always clear, leaving no surplus of goods and no willing labor left idle.
Nowcasting in economics is the prediction of the present, the very near future, and the very recent past state of an economic indicator. The term is a contraction of "now" and "forecasting" and originates in meteorology. It has recently become popular in economics as typical measures used to assess the state of an economy, are only determined after a long delay and are subject to revision. Nowcasting models have been applied most notably in Central Banks, who use the estimates to monitor the state of the economy in real-time as a proxy for official measures.
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