IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jpolmo/v36y2014i2p296-312.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Where is the Fed in the distribution of forecasters?

Author

Listed:
  • Gamber, Edward N.
  • Smith, Julie K.
  • McNamara, Dylan C.

Abstract

Previous research comparing the Fed's Greenbook forecasts with a median forecast from a private-sector panel has found that the Fed's forecasts are superior. These comparisons potentially miss information from other parts of the distribution of forecast errors. We compare the Fed's forecast errors to the upper and lower quartiles from the Survey of Professional Forecasters’ forecast errors and find that errors in the lower quartile are significantly smaller. We further investigate whether the forecasters who produced those forecast errors can be identified ex-ante and find that while possible the practicality of this finding is limited due to forecaster turnover.

Suggested Citation

  • Gamber, Edward N. & Smith, Julie K. & McNamara, Dylan C., 2014. "Where is the Fed in the distribution of forecasters?," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 296-312.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jpolmo:v:36:y:2014:i:2:p:296-312
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jpolmod.2013.11.002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0161893814000106
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jpolmod.2013.11.002?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Faust Jon & Swanson Eric T & Wright Jonathan H, 2004. "Do Federal Reserve Policy Surprises Reveal Superior Information about the Economy?," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 1-31, October.
    2. Antonello D'Agostino & Domenico Giannone & Paolo Surico, 2005. "(Un)Predictability and Macroeconomic Stability," Macroeconomics 0510024, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Baghestani, Hamid, 2008. "Federal Reserve versus private information: Who is the best unemployment rate predictor," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 30(1), pages 101-110.
    4. Edward N. Gamber & Julie K. Smith & Matthew Weiss, 2008. "Forecast Errors Before and After the Great Moderation," Working Papers 2008-001, The George Washington University, Department of Economics, H. O. Stekler Research Program on Forecasting, revised Mar 2009.
    5. Lamont, Owen A., 2002. "Macroeconomic forecasts and microeconomic forecasters," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 48(3), pages 265-280, July.
    6. Faust, Jon & Wright, Jonathan H., 2009. "Comparing Greenbook and Reduced Form Forecasts Using a Large Realtime Dataset," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 27(4), pages 468-479.
    7. Croushore, Dean & Koot, Ronald S., 1994. "A measure of federal reserve credibility," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 16(2), pages 215-231, April.
    8. Casillas-Olvera, Gabriel & Bessler, David A., 2006. "Probability forecasting and central bank accountability," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 28(2), pages 223-234, February.
    9. David H. Romer & Christina D. Romer, 2000. "Federal Reserve Information and the Behavior of Interest Rates," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(3), pages 429-457, June.
    10. Gamber, Edward N. & Hakes, David R., 2005. "Is monetary policy important for forecasting real growth and inflation?," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 177-187, March.
    11. Tara Sinclair & H. O. Stekler & L. Kitzinger, 2010. "Directional forecasts of GDP and inflation: a joint evaluation with an application to Federal Reserve predictions," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 42(18), pages 2289-2297.
    12. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 2007. "Why Has U.S. Inflation Become Harder to Forecast?," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(s1), pages 3-33, February.
    13. Gamber, Edward N. & Smith, Julie K., 2009. "Are the Fed's inflation forecasts still superior to the private sector's?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 240-251, June.
    14. Joutz, Fred & Stekler, H. O., 2000. "An evaluation of the predictions of the Federal Reserve," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 17-38.
    15. Harvey, David & Leybourne, Stephen & Newbold, Paul, 1997. "Testing the equality of prediction mean squared errors," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 281-291, June.
    16. Mr. Christopher W. Crowe, 2010. "Consensus Forecasts and Inefficient Information Aggregation," IMF Working Papers 2010/178, International Monetary Fund.
    17. David L. Reifschneider & Peter Tulip, 2007. "Gauging the uncertainty of the economic outlook from historical forecasting errors," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2007-60, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    18. Andrew Atkeson & Lee E. Ohanian, 2001. "Are Phillips curves useful for forecasting inflation?," Quarterly Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, vol. 25(Win), pages 2-11.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Constantin Bürgi & Tara M. Sinclair, 2017. "A nonparametric approach to identifying a subset of forecasters that outperforms the simple average," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 53(1), pages 101-115, August.
    2. Gamber, Edward N. & Liebner, Jeffrey P. & Smith, Julie K., 2015. "The distribution of inflation forecast errors," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 47-64.
    3. Weber, Christoph S., 2019. "The effect of central bank transparency on exchange rate volatility," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 165-181.
    4. Ekşi Ozan & Taş Bedri Kamil Onur & Orman Cüneyt, 2017. "Has the forecasting performance of the Federal Reserve’s Greenbooks changed over time?," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 17(2), pages 1-25, June.
    5. Tim Köhler & Jörg Döpke, 2023. "Will the last be the first? Ranking German macroeconomic forecasters based on different criteria," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 64(2), pages 797-832, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Paul Hubert, 2015. "Revisiting the Greenbook’s relative forecasting performance," Revue de l'OFCE, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 0(1), pages 151-179.
    2. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/35kgubh40v9gfpnuruelqjnptb is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Gamber, Edward N. & Smith, Julie K., 2009. "Are the Fed's inflation forecasts still superior to the private sector's?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 240-251, June.
    4. Paul Hubert, 2015. "Do Central Bank Forecasts Influence Private Agents? Forecasting Performance versus Signals," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 47(4), pages 771-789, June.
    5. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/3pot7260lh88lrfhrhvs85lh2f is not listed on IDEAS
    6. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/3pot7260lh88lrfhrhvs85lh2f is not listed on IDEAS
    7. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/f4rshpf3v1umfa09lat09b1bg is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Paul Hubert, 2010. "Monetary Policy, Imperfect Information and the Expectations Channel," Sciences Po publications info:hdl:2441/f4rshpf3v1u, Sciences Po.
    9. Baghestani, Hamid, 2008. "Federal Reserve versus private information: Who is the best unemployment rate predictor," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 30(1), pages 101-110.
    10. repec:spo:wpecon:info:hdl:2441/f4rshpf3v1umfa09lat09b1bg is not listed on IDEAS
    11. Rochelle M. Edge & Refet S. Gurkaynak, 2010. "How Useful Are Estimated DSGE Model Forecasts for Central Bankers?," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 41(2 (Fall)), pages 209-259.
    12. repec:hal:wpspec:info:hdl:2441/f4rshpf3v1umfa09lat09b1bg is not listed on IDEAS
    13. Paul Hubert, 2010. "Monetary policy, imperfect information and the expectations channel [Politique monétaire,information imparfaite et canal des anticipations]," SciencePo Working papers Main tel-04095385, HAL.
    14. Bedri Kamil Onur Taş, 2016. "Does the Federal Reserve have Private Information about its Future Actions?," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 83(331), pages 498-517, July.
    15. Faust, Jon & Wright, Jonathan H., 2013. "Forecasting Inflation," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 2-56, Elsevier.
    16. Liu, Dandan & Smith, Julie K., 2014. "Inflation forecasts and core inflation measures: Where is the information on future inflation?," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 54(1), pages 133-137.
    17. Jones, Adam T. & Ogden, Richard E., 2017. "A day late and a dollar short: The effect of policy uncertainty on fed forecast errors," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 112-122.
    18. Antonello D'Agostino & Karl Whelan, 2008. "Federal Reserve Information During the Great Moderation," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(2-3), pages 609-620, 04-05.
    19. Julien Champagne & Guillaume Poulin‐Bellisle & Rodrigo Sekkel, 2020. "Introducing the Bank of Canada staff economic projections database," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 35(1), pages 114-129, January.
    20. Rochelle M. Edge & Michael T. Kiley & Jean-Philippe Laforte, 2010. "A comparison of forecast performance between Federal Reserve staff forecasts, simple reduced-form models, and a DSGE model," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(4), pages 720-754.
    21. João Valle e Azevedo & João Tovar Jalles, 2011. "Rational vs. Professional Forecasts," Working Papers w201114, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
    22. Edward S. Knotek & Saeed Zaman, 2017. "Nowcasting U.S. Headline and Core Inflation," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 49(5), pages 931-968, August.
    23. Kishor N. Kundan, 2010. "The Superiority of Greenbook Forecasts and the Role of Recessions," NBP Working Papers 74, Narodowy Bank Polski.
    24. Carola Conces Binder & Rodrigo Sekkel, 2023. "Central Bank Forecasting: A Survey," Staff Working Papers 23-18, Bank of Canada.
    25. Peter Tulip, 2009. "Has the Economy Become More Predictable? Changes in Greenbook Forecast Accuracy," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 41(6), pages 1217-1231, September.
    26. Bespalova, Olga, 2018. "Forecast Evaluation in Macroeconomics and International Finance. Ph.D. thesis, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA," MPRA Paper 117706, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Monetary policy; Forecasting;

    JEL classification:

    • E3 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles
    • E5 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jpolmo:v:36:y:2014:i:2:p:296-312. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505735 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.