Forecasting for Finance and Macroeconomics

Governments, central banks, and financial institutions must commit to decisions today on the basis of numbers that will not be known for months or even years, and they must also evaluate how the economy will respond to the policies they choose. This course has two halves. The first develops a practical forecasting toolkit and applies it to public macroeconomic and financial data to project growth, inflation, employment, interest rates, and asset prices. The second turns to how various shocks (including monetary, fiscal, energy, and climate-related) propagate through the economy using VAR models and local projection methods. The course also evaluates forecasts produced by policy institutions, consumers, analysts, and firms. The course is mostly applied and assignments use R. No prior background in macroeconomics or finance is required.