Comparison of Models for Growth-at-Risk Forecasting

During the past several decades, the importance of assessing the risk of GDP growth downturns has increased tremendously. The financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the global lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the vulnerability of the modern economy. As a result, a new framework (Growth-at-Risk) has been developed which allows the estimation of the size of the potential downfall of future GDP growth. However, most of the research focuses on the performance of quantile regression. I apply different approaches to forecasting growthat-risk, including quantile regression, quantile random forests, and generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (GARCH) models, using the US economy for the analysis. I find that GARCH-type models perform worse at 5% and 10% coverage levels, but that quantile random forests and quantile regressions seem to have equal predictive ability.