Financial-Cycle Ratios and Multi-Year Predictions of GDP: Evidence from the United States

Using a large quarterly macroeconomic dataset over the period 1960Q1-2017Q4, this paper documents the usefulness of selected financial ratios from the housing market and firms' aggregate balance sheets for predicting GDP in the United States over multi-year horizons. A house price-to-rent ratio adjusted for the business cycle and the liabilities-to-income ratio of the nonfinancial noncorporate business sector provide the best in-sample fit and out-of-sample forecasts of cumulative GDP growth over horizons of 1-5 years, outperforming all other predictors as well as popular high-dimensional forecasting models and forecast combinations.