A1051
Title: Lessons for forecasting unemployment in the U.S.: Use flow rates, mind the trend
Authors: Murat Tasci - Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (United States) [presenting]
Abstract: The aim is to evaluate the ability of autoregressive models, professional forecasters, and models that leverage unemployment flows to forecast the unemployment rate. We pay particular attention to flows-based approaches to generalize whether data on unemployment flows is useful in forecasting the unemployment rate. We find that any approach that leverages unemployment inflow and outflow rates performs well in the near term. Over longer forecast horizons, we find a useful framework, even though it was designed to be mainly a tool to uncover long-run labor market dynamics such as the ``natural'' rate. Its usefulness is amplified at specific points in the business cycle when unemployment rate is away from the longer-run natural rate. Judgemental forecasts from professional economists tend to be the single best predictor of future unemployment rates. However, combining those guesses with flows-based approaches yields significant gains in forecasting accuracy.
