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Bias in Federal Reserve Inflation Forecasts: Is the Federal Reserve Irrational or Just Cautious?

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Author Info
Carlos Capistrán-Carmona

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Abstract

This paper documents that inflation forecasts of the Federal Reserve systematically under-predicted inflation before Volker's appointment as Chairman and systematically over-predicted it afterward. It also documents that, under quadratic loss, commercial forecasts have information not contained in the forecasts of the Federal Reserve. It demonstrates that this evidence leads to a rejection of the joint hypothesis that the Federal Reserve has rational expectations and quadratic loss. To investigate the causes of this failure, this paper uses moment conditions derived from a model of an inflation targeting central bank to back out the loss function implied by the forecasts of the Federal Reserve. It finds that the cost of having inflation above the target was larger than the cost of having inflation below it for the post-Volker Federal Reserve, and that the opposite was true for the pre-Volker era. Once these asymmetries are taken into account, the Federal Reserve is found to be rational and to efficiently incorporate the information contained in forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters

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Paper provided by Society for Computational Economics in its series Computing in Economics and Finance 2005 with number 127.

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Date of creation: 11 Nov 2005
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Handle: RePEc:sce:scecf5:127

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Related research
Keywords: Asymmetric loss function; Inflation forecasts; Forecast Evaluation;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Other Model Applications
E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Martin Ellison & Thomas J. Sargent, 2009. "A defence of the FOMC," Economics Series Working Papers 457, University of Oxford, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
  2. Stanislav Anatolyev, 2006. "Dynamic modeling under linear-exponential loss," Working Papers w0092, Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR). [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  3. Elliott, Graham & Timmermann, Allan G, 2007. "Economic Forecasting," CEPR Discussion Papers 6158, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  4. Kim , Insu & Kim, Minsoo, 2009. "Irrational Bias in Inflation Forecasts," MPRA Paper 16447, University Library of Munich, Germany. [Downloadable!]
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