Macroblog

February 13, 2018

GDPNow's Forecast: Why Did It Spike Recently?

If you felt whipsawed by GDPNow recently, it's understandable. On February 1, the Atlanta Fed's GDPNow model estimate of first-quarter real gross domestic product (GDP) growth surged from 4.2 percent to 5.4 percent (annualized rates) after a manufacturing report from the Institute for Supply Management. GDPNow's estimate then fell to 4.0 percent on February 2 after the employment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. GDPNow displayed a similar undulating pattern early in the forecast cycle for fourth-quarter GDP growth.

What accounted for these sawtooth patterns? The answer lies in the treatment of the ISM manufacturing release. To forecast the yet-to-be released monthly GDP source data apart from inventories, GDPNow uses an indicator of growth in economic activity from a statistical model called a dynamic factor model. The factor is estimated from 127 monthly macroeconomic indicators, many of which are used to estimate the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI). Indices like these can be helpful for forecasting macroeconomic data, as demonstrated here  and here.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the CFNAI and the GDPNow factor are highly correlated, as the red and blue lines in the chart below indicate. Both indices, which are normalized to have an average of 0 and a standard deviation of 1, are usually lower in recessions than expansions.

A major difference in the indices is how yet-to-be-released values are handled for months in the recent past that have reported values for some, but not all, of the source data. For example, on February 2, January 2018 values had been released for data from the ISM manufacturing and employment reports but not from the industrial production or retail sales reports. The CFNAI is released around the end of each month when about two-thirds of the 85 indicators used to construct it have reported values for the previous month. For the remaining indicators, the Chicago Fed fills in statistical model forecasts for unreported values. In contrast, the GDPNow factor is updated continuously and extended a month after each ISM manufacturing release. On the dates of the ISM releases, around 17 of the 127 indicators GDPNow uses have reported values for the previous month, with six coming from the ISM manufacturing report.

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For months with partially missing data, GDPNow updates its factor with an approach similar to the one used in a 2008 paper by economists Domenico Giannone, Lucrezia Reichlin and David Small. That paper describes a dynamic factor model used to nowcast GDP growth similar to the one that generates the New York Fed's staff nowcast of GDP growth. In the Atlanta Fed's GDPNow factor model, the last month of ISM manufacturing data have large weights when calculating the terminal factor value right after the ISM report. These ISM weights decrease significantly after the employment report, when about 50 of the indicators have reported values for the last month of data.

In the above figure, we see that the January 2018 GDPNow factor reading was 1.37 after the February 1 ISM release, the strongest reading since 1994 and well above either its forecasted value of 0.42 prior to the ISM release or its estimated value of 0.43 after the February 2 employment release. The aforementioned rise and decline in the GDPNow forecast of first-quarter growth is largely a function of the rise and decline in the January 2018 estimates of the dynamic factor.

Although the January 2018 reading of 59.2 for the composite ISM purchasing managers index (PMI) was higher than any reading from 2005 to 2016, it was little different than either a consensus forecast from professional economists (58.8) or the forecast from a simple model (58.9) that uses the strong reading in December 2017 (59.3). Moreover, it was well above the reading the GDPNow dynamic factor model was expecting (54.5).

A possible shortcoming of the GDPNow factor model is that it does not account for the previous month's forecast errors when forecasting the 127 indicators. For example, the predicted composite ISM PMI reading of 54.4 in December 2017 was nearly 5 points lower than the actual value. For this discussion, let's adjust GDPNow's factor model to account for these forecast errors and consider a forecast evaluation period with revised current vintage data after 1999. Then, the average absolute error of the 85–90 day-ahead adjusted model forecasts of GDP growth after ISM manufacturing releases (1.40 percentage points) is lower than the average absolute forecast error on those same dates for the standard version of GDPNow (1.49 percentage points). Moreover, the forecasts using the adjusted factor model are significantly more accurate than the GDPNow forecasts, according to a standard statistical test . If we decide to incorporate adjustments to GDPNow's factor model, we will do so at an initial forecast of quarterly GDP growth and note the change here .

Would the adjustment have made a big difference in the initial first-quarter GDP forecast? The February 1 GDP growth forecast of GDPNow with the adjusted factor model was "only" 4.7 percent. Its current (February 9) forecast of first-quarter GDP growth was the same as the standard version of GDPNow: 4.0 percent. These estimates are still much higher than both the recent trend in GDP growth and the median forecast of 3.0 percent from the Philadelphia Fed's Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF).

Most of the difference between the GDPNow and SPF forecasts of GDP growth is the result of inventories. GDPNow anticipates inventories will contribute 1.2 percentage points to first-quarter growth, and the median SPF projection implies an inventory contribution of only 0.4 percentage points. It's not unusual to see some disagreement between these inventory forecasts and it wouldn't be surprising if one—or both—of them turn out to be off the mark.

By Pat Higgins, a policy adviser and economist in the Atlanta Fed's research department

• February 13, 2018 in
  • Business Cycles
  • Forecasts
  • GDP
  • Productivity
  • This That and the Other
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November 6, 2017

Building a Better Model: Introducing Changes to GDPNow

Among the frequently asked questions on GDPNow's web page is this one:

Is any judgment used to adjust the forecasts? Our answer:

No. Once the GDPNow model begins forecasting GDP growth for a particular quarter, the code will not be adjusted until after the "advance" estimate. If we improve the model over time, we will roll out changes right after the "advance" estimate so that forecasts for the subsequent quarter use a fixed methodology for their entire evolution.

This macroblog post enumerates a number of minor changes to GDPNow that were implemented on October 30, when it began forecasting fourth-quarter real gross domestic product (GDP) growth. Here is a summary of the changes, intended to improve the accuracy of the GDP subcomponent forecasts:

1. Services personal consumption expenditures (PCE). Use industrial production of electric and gas utilities to nowcast real PCE on electricity and natural gas. Use international trade data on travel services to forecast revisions to related PCE travel data.
2. Real business equipment investment. Use/forecast data from the advance U.S. Census Bureau reports on durable manufacturing  and international trade in goods  that, previously, hadn't been utilized until the full reports on manufacturing  and/or international trade .
3. Real nonresidential structures investment. Replace a discontinued seasonally adjusted producer price index for "Steel mill products: Steel pipe and tube" with a nonseasonally adjusted version. The index is used to construct a price deflator for private monthly nonresidential construction spending.
4. Real residential investment. Use employment data for production and nonsupervisory employees of residential remodelers to help forecast real investment in residential improvements.
5. Real change in private inventories. Use published monthly inventory levels in the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis's underlying detail tables 1BU and 1BUC after the third-release GDP estimate from the prior quarter to estimate inventory levels for a number of industries in the first month of the quarter forecasted by GDPNow.
6. Federal, state, and local government spending. Forecast investment in intellectual property products for these subcomponents using autoregression models.

The first three columns of the following table decompose the official estimate of the third-quarter real GDP growth rate, and forecasts of the growth rate from the discontinued and modified versions of GDPNow, into percentage point contributions from the subcomponents of GDP.

As the table shows, the methodological changes did not have much of an impact on the final third-quarter subcomponent forecasts—apart from inventory investment, where the modifications lowered the contribution to growth from 0.80 percentage points to 0.60 percentage points—or on their accuracy. Nevertheless, the topline GDP forecast of the modified model (2.3 percent) was less accurate than the previous version (2.5 percent). In the discontinued version of GDPNow, an overestimate of the inventory investment contribution to growth partly canceled out underestimated contributions from each of net exports, government spending, and nonresidential fixed investment.

In the modified version, the inventory contribution was also underestimated and did not cancel out these other errors. The last two columns of the table show that all of the subcomponent errors of the modified model were at least as small as their historical average for the discontinued version. However, the topline GDP forecast was less accurate than average because of less cancellation of the subcomponent errors than usual. We hope that the cancellation of subcomponent errors in the modified model will be more similar to the historical average in the discontinued version in the future.

Although the methodological changes could have more of an impact than the table suggests, we do not expect them to have a substantial impact in general. For example, on October 30, the discontinued version of GDPNow projected 3.0 percent GDP growth in the fourth quarter, which was little different from the modified model forecast of 2.9 percent growth. We provide a more detailed explanation of the changes to GDPNow here . Going forward, this same document will document any further changes to the model and when we made them.

By Pat Higgins, a policy adviser in the Atlanta Fed's research department

• November 6, 2017 in
  • Forecasts
  • GDP
  • macroeconomics
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May 22, 2017

GDPNow's Second Quarter Forecast: Is It Too High?

Real gross domestic product (GDP) growth slowed from a 2 percent pace in 2016 to an annual rate of 0.7 percent in the first quarter of 2017. The Federal Open Market Committee viewed this slowdown in growth "as likely to be transitory," according to its last statement.

Indeed, current quarter GDP forecasting models maintained by the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, St. Louis, and Atlanta have been pointing toward stronger second quarter growth (2.3 percent, 2.6 percent and 4.1 percent, as reported on their respective websites on May 19, 2017).

The Atlanta Fed's model—GDPNow—is at the high end of this range and is also high relative to other professional forecasts. The median forecast for second quarter real GDP growth in the May Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) was 3.1 percent, for instance, and recent forecasts from Blue Chip Publication surveys displayed on our GDPNow page show some divergence from our model as well.

We encourage—and frequently receive—feedback on our GDPNow tool, and some users have suggested that our forecast for second quarter growth is too high. In fact, some empirical evidence supports that view. The evidence considered here correlates differences between consensus Blue Chip Economic Indicators Survey and GDPNow forecasts for growth about 80 days before the first GDP release with the GDPNow forecast errors (see the chart below).

A note about the chart: The horizontal axis shows the difference between the Blue Chip consensus forecasts and GDPNow's forecast. The vertical axis measures the 80-day-ahead GDPNow forecast error, defined as the difference between the first published estimate of real GDP growth and the GDPNow forecast at the time of the mid-quarter Blue Chip survey.

As the chart shows, there is a positive relationship between the Blue Chip-GDPNow discrepancy and the GDPNow forecast error. A simple linear regression would predict that the GDPNow forecast of 3.7 percent growth on May 5 was too high by nearly 1.0 percentage point. Moreover, the chart suggests that there has been a bias in GDPNow forecasts since the fourth quarter of 2015 of between 0.9 and 2.0 percentage points at the time of these mid-quarter Blue Chip surveys. If you are inclined to think the GDPNow forecast for second quarter growth is a bit too high, then this evidence will not change your mind.

Given this evidence, you might think that putting relatively little stock in the GDPNow forecast at this point in the quarter would be prudent. Indeed, if we calculate the weighted average of the historical Blue Chip consensus and GDPNow forecasts that produced the most accurate forecast of the first estimate of real GDP growth, then the optimal weight of the GDPNow forecast lies somewhere between 0.34 and 0.55 (see the chart below). The weight depends on the number of days until the first GDP release.

For example, the optimal weight of 0.55 on GDPNow about 54 days before the first GDP release means that 0.55 times the GDPNow forecast plus 0.45 times Blue Chip consensus survey forecast has been more accurate, on average, than any other weighted average of the two forecasts. The lowest weight on GDPNow corresponds to forecasts made about 83 days before the first GDP release—the time when GDPNow's bean-counting algorithms have the least amount of source data to work with.

A weighted average of the Blue Chip consensus and GDPNow forecasts at that time would put the GDP forecast about 0.6 to 0.7 percentage points below the current GDPNow forecast. However, the confidence bands around these estimates are wide, so the positive weight placed on GDPNow early in the quarter could just be the result of chance.

Let's cut to the chase—why, exactly, is the GDPNow forecast for second quarter GDP growth so high? The details of the GDPNow forecast provide some clues. We can compare the GDPNow forecasts of GDP components with those from the SPF. (The Blue Chip forecast does not provide detail on all the GDP components.) The following table translates the median SPF forecasts into contributions to second quarter real GDP growth. These contributions are shown alongside GDPNow's forecasted contributions as well as the average contributions to real GDP growth over the prior four quarters.

Clearly, more than half of the difference between the GDP growth forecasts from GDPNow and the SPF is due to inventories. For both forecasts, inventory investment also accounts for over half of the pickup in second quarter growth from the trailing four-quarter average.

A macroblog post I wrote last year showed that the growth-forecast contribution of mid-quarter inventory investment produced roughly equivalent accuracy in the SPF and GDPNow models, but it was much less accurate than the contribution forecasts of the other GDP components. Based on experience, we can't be confident that either forecast of inventory investment is likely to be very accurate or that one is likely to be much more accurate than another.

With very little hard data in hand for the second quarter for most of the GDP components—and for inventories in particular—we will continue to closely monitor if the data are as strong as GDPNow is anticipating or if they hew more closely to other forecasts. Check back with us to see.

By Pat Higgins, an associate policy adviser and economist in the Atlanta Fed's research department

• May 22, 2017 in
  • Forecasts
  • GDP
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March 2, 2017

Gauging Firm Optimism in a Time of Transition

Recent consumer sentiment index measures have hit postrecession highs, but there is evidence of significant differences in respondents' views on the new administration's economic policies. As Richard Curtin, chief economist for the Michigan Survey of Consumers, states:

When asked to describe any recent news that they had heard about the economy, 30% spontaneously mentioned some favorable aspect of Trump's policies, and 29% unfavorably referred to Trump's economic policies. Thus a total of nearly six-in-ten consumers made a positive or negative mention of government policies...never before have these spontaneous references to economic policies had such a large impact on the Sentiment Index: a difference of 37 Index points between those that referred to favorable and unfavorable policies.

It seems clear that government policies are holding sway over consumers' economic outlook. But what about firms? Are they being affected similarly? Are there any firm characteristics that might predict their view? And how might this view change over time?

To begin exploring these questions, we've adopted a series of "optimism" questions to be asked periodically as part of the Atlanta Fed's Business Inflation Expectations Survey's special question series. The optimism questions are based on those that have appeared in the Duke CFO Global Business Outlook survey since 2002, available quarterly. (The next set of results from the CFO survey will appear in March.)

We first put these questions to our business inflation expectations (BIE) panel in November 2016 . The survey period coincided with the week of the U.S. presidential election, allowing us to observe any pre- and post-election changes. We found that firms were more optimistic about their own firm's financial prospects than about the economy as a whole. This finding held for all sectors and firm size categories (chart 1).

In addition, we found no statistical difference in the pre- and post-election measures, as chart 2 shows. (For the stat aficionados among you, we mean that we found no statistical difference at the 95 percent level of confidence.)

We were curious how our firms' optimism might have evolved since the election, so we repeated the questions last month  (February 6–10).

Among firms responding in both November and February (approximately 82 percent of respondents), the overall level of optimism increased, on average (chart 3). This increase in optimism is statistically significant and was seen across firms of all sizes and sector types (goods producers and service providers).

The question remains: what is the upshot of this increased optimism? Are firms adjusting their capital investment and employment plans to accommodate this more optimistic outlook? The data should answer these questions in the coming months, but in the meantime, we will continue to monitor the evolution of business optimism.

By Nicholas Parker, economic policy specialist and both in the Atlanta Fed's research department, and

Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director, both in the Atlanta Fed's research department

• March 2, 2017 in
  • Books
  • Business Inflation Expectations
  • Economic conditions
  • Economic Growth and Development
  • Forecasts
  • Inflation Expectations
  • Saving Capital and Investment
  • Small Business
  • Surveys
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