Do Forecasters Believe in Okun’s Law? An Assessment of Unemployment and Output Forecasts

This paper provides an assessment of the consistency of unemployment and output forecasts. We show that, consistent with Okun’s Law, forecasts of real GDP growth and the change in unemployment are negatively correlated. The Okun coefficient—the responsiveness of unemployment to growth—from forecasts...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ball, Laurence
Other Authors: Jalles, João Tovar, Loungani, Prakash
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Washington, D.C. International Monetary Fund 2014
Series:IMF Working Papers
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: International Monetary Fund - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
LEADER 02379nmm a2200505 u 4500
001 EB002078168
003 EBX01000000000000001218258
005 00000000000000.0
007 cr|||||||||||||||||||||
008 220928 ||| eng
020 |a 9781475584097 
100 1 |a Ball, Laurence 
245 0 0 |a Do Forecasters Believe in Okun’s Law? An Assessment of Unemployment and Output Forecasts  |c Laurence Ball, João Tovar Jalles, Prakash Loungani 
260 |a Washington, D.C.  |b International Monetary Fund  |c 2014 
300 |a 19 pages 
651 4 |a Germany 
653 |a Economic & financial crises & disasters 
653 |a Labour 
653 |a Financial crises 
653 |a Economic Forecasting 
653 |a Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search 
653 |a Fiscal Policy 
653 |a Unemployment 
653 |a National accounts 
653 |a Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles: Forecasting and Simulation 
653 |a National income 
653 |a Labor 
653 |a Global Financial Crisis, 2008-2009 
653 |a Global financial crisis of 2008-2009 
653 |a Forecasting and Other Model Applications 
653 |a Macroeconomics 
653 |a Gdp forecasting 
653 |a Unemployment rate 
653 |a Income economics 
653 |a Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications 
653 |a Financial Crises 
700 1 |a Jalles, João Tovar 
700 1 |a Loungani, Prakash 
041 0 7 |a eng  |2 ISO 639-2 
989 |b IMF  |a International Monetary Fund 
490 0 |a IMF Working Papers 
028 5 0 |a 10.5089/9781475584097.001 
856 4 0 |u https://elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2014/024/001.2014.issue-024-en.xml?cid=41323-com-dsp-marc  |x Verlag  |3 Volltext 
082 0 |a 330 
520 |a This paper provides an assessment of the consistency of unemployment and output forecasts. We show that, consistent with Okun’s Law, forecasts of real GDP growth and the change in unemployment are negatively correlated. The Okun coefficient—the responsiveness of unemployment to growth—from forecasts is fairly similar to that in the data for various countries. Furthermore, revisions to unemployment forecasts are negatively correlated with revisions to real GDP forecasts. These results are based on forecasts taken from Consensus Economics for nine advanced countries since 1989