The Model Comparison Seminar began as part of a grant from the National Science Foundation to the National Bureau of Economic Research establishing the Conference on Econometrics and Mathematical Economics (CEME) during the mid 1970's. Leading macroeconomic model builders in the United States met for repeated seminars which produced a series of research papers that were first published in International Economic Review, 1974-75, and then collected in a single volume entitled Econometric Model Performance, edited by Nobel Laureate Lawrence Klein and Edwin Burmeister (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976).

After a hiatus in US model comparisons of about 10 years, the seminar reconvened under the direction of Lawrence Klein in 1985. A second round of model comparisons was undertaken and the results published in 1991 by Oxford Press in a companion volume to the original entitled, Comparative Performance of U.S. Econometric Models (Lawrence Klein, ed.).

Since 1991 the seminar has continued to meet at least once each year, with policy makers in Washington in the Fall to review the short-term outlook and provide input into current policy debates, and occasionally again in the Spring to further the academic research efforts of the seminar.

The primary objective of the CEME Model Comparison Seminar is to conduct experiments to identify the structural characteristics of the participating models in an effort to better understand why the models differ. The seminar also investigates current research in related fields in order to evaluate the state of the art in macroeconomic modeling and enhance current modeling practices among the practices.