Forecasting exogenous fiscal variables in the United States

Darrel Cohen and Glenn Follette

No 2003-59, Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: This paper provides an introduction to the practice of forecasting \"exogenous\" components of federal government taxes and spending-policy actions, for short--in the United States. First, we estimate simple models of defense expenditures that are useful for constructing current-quarter forecasts based on incoming daily and monthly spending data. Also, we discuss forecasting policy changes in the context of extending recent empirical work of Alan Auerbach (2002, 2003) on fiscal reaction functions. Forecasts of exogenous fiscal actions are an important input into forecasts of the budget deficit, and we compare the forecasts of the budget deficit prepared by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the President's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the staff o the Federal Reserve Board (FRB). To our knowledge, analysis of the FRB forecasts has not been done before.

Keywords: Fiscal policy; Expenditures, Public (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ets and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2003/200359/200359abs.html (text/html)
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2003/200359/200359pap.pdf (application/pdf)

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:fip:fedgfe:2003-59

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier ().