Business forecasting during the pandemic

John O’Trakoun ()
Additional contact information
John O’Trakoun: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: John O'Trakoun

Business Economics, 2022, vol. 57, issue 3, No 2, 95-110

Abstract: Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic shock represents a once-in-a-generation challenge to both the global economy and to business forecasting, contributing to elevated economic uncertainty through today. In this article, we perform a retrospective evaluation of some of the workhorse statistical models used by business economists to see which approaches were most resilient during the pandemic shock. We find projection-based approaches were more resilient to the pandemic shock than iteration-based forecasts in the cases we studied. We also find that the pandemic induced significant variation in forecast accuracy among the models which incorporate macroeconomic data. Incorporating alternative high-frequency data which gained currency during the pandemic into these models did not necessarily improve forecast performance, however more research is needed to assess the extent to which these indicators improved business planning.

Keywords: Business forecasting; Economic forecasting; COVID-19; Pandemic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E27 E37 M20 M21 N62 N72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s11369-022-00267-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:pal:buseco:v:57:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1057_s11369-022-00267-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11369

DOI: 10.1057/s11369-022-00267-2

Access Statistics for this article

Business Economics is currently edited by Charles Steindel

More articles in Business Economics from Palgrave Macmillan, National Association for Business Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().