Regional aggregation in forecasting: an application to the Federal Reserve's Eighth District

Kristie Engemann, Ruben Hernandez-Murillo and Michael Owyang

Regional Economic Development, 2008, issue Oct, 15-29

Abstract: Hernndez-Murillo and Owyang (2006) showed that accounting for spatial correlations in regional data can improve forecasts of national employment. This paper considers whether the predictive advantage of disaggregate models remains when forecasting subnational data. The authors conduct horse races among several forecasting models in which the objective is to forecast regional- or state-level employment. For some models, the objective is to forecast using the sum of further disaggregated employment (i.e., forecasts of metropolitan statistical area (MSA)-level data are summed to yield state-level forecasts). The authors find that the spatial relationships between states have sufficient predictive content to overcome small increases in the number of estimated parameters when forecasting regional-level data; this is not always true when forecasting state- and regional-level data using the sum of MSA-level forecasts.

Keywords: Economic forecasting; Federal Reserve District, 8th (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/red/2008/01/Engemann.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Regional aggregation in forecasting: an application to the Federal Reserve’s Eighth District (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedlrd:y:2008:i:oct:p:15-29:n:v.4no.1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Regional Economic Development from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Scott St. Louis ().