A Comparison of the Forecasting Performance of Markov-Switching and Threshold Autoregressive Models of US GNP

While there has been a great deal of interest in the modeling of non-linearities in economic time series, there is no clear consensus regarding the forecasting abilities of non-linear time series models. We evaluate the performance of two leading non-linear models in forecasting post-war US GNP, the self-exciting threshold autoregressive model and the Markov-switching autoregressive model.