IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/gwc/wpaper/2025-003.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Dispersion of FOMC Policymakers: Evidence from Individual Economic Projections with Identities

Author

Listed:
  • Natsuki Arai
  • Shian Chang

Abstract

This paper analyzes the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) policymakers' economic projections with identities published after 2007 and presents three sets of results. First, the dispersion of projections across policymakers is associated with the regional economic conditions they represent and their monetary policy preferences. Second, the policymakers' reaction function is consistent with the Taylor rule and satisfies the Taylor principle for stability. Their projections align with Okun's law and the Phillips curve. Finally, the efficiency evaluations to test the unpredictability of forecast errors and revisions indicate that the efficiency is rejected by many policymakers, with rejections concentrated in the years following the Great Recession.

Suggested Citation

  • Natsuki Arai & Shian Chang, 2025. "Dispersion of FOMC Policymakers: Evidence from Individual Economic Projections with Identities," Working Papers 2025-003, The George Washington University, Department of Economics, H. O. Stekler Research Program on Forecasting.
  • Handle: RePEc:gwc:wpaper:2025-003
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www2.gwu.edu/~forcpgm/2025-003.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2025
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David Romer, 2010. "A New Data Set on Monetary Policy: The Economic Forecasts of Individual Members of the FOMC," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 42(5), pages 951-957, August.
    2. Jung, Alexander & Latsos, Sophia, 2015. "Do federal reserve bank presidents have a regional bias?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 40(PA), pages 173-183.
    3. Barbara Rossi & Tatevik Sekhposyan, 2016. "Forecast Rationality Tests in the Presence of Instabilities, with Applications to Federal Reserve and Survey Forecasts," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(3), pages 507-532, April.
    4. Ellis, Michael A. & Liu, Dandan, 2013. "Do FOMC forecasts add value to staff forecasts?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 332-340.
    5. Bennani, Hamza & Farvaque, Etienne & Stanek, Piotr, 2018. "Influence of regional cycles and personal background on FOMC members’ preferences and disagreement," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 416-424.
    6. Bennani, Hamza & Kranz, Tobias & Neuenkirch, Matthias, 2018. "Disagreement between FOMC members and the Fed’s staff: New insights based on a counterfactual interest rate," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 139-153.
    7. 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.
    8. Carola Conces Binder, 2021. "Central Bank Communication and Disagreement about the Natural Rate Hypothesis," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 17(2), pages 81-123, June.
    9. 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.
    10. Clark, Todd E. & West, Kenneth D., 2007. "Approximately normal tests for equal predictive accuracy in nested models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 138(1), pages 291-311, May.
    11. Jacob A. Mincer, 1969. "Economic Forecasts and Expectations: Analysis of Forecasting Behavior and Performance," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number minc69-1, June.
    12. Henry W. Chappell, Jr. & Rob Roy McGregor & Todd A. Vermilyea, 2005. "Committee Decisions on Monetary Policy: Evidence from Historical Records of the Federal Open Market Committee," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262033305, December.
    13. Brent Bundick, 2015. "Estimating the Monetary Policy Rule Perceived by Forecasters," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, issue Q IV, pages 33-49.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. Carola Conces Binder & Rodrigo Sekkel, 2024. "Central bank forecasting: A survey," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(2), pages 342-364, April.
    2. Arai, Natsuki, 2023. "The FOMC’s new individual economic projections and macroeconomic theories," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).
    3. Barbara Rossi & Tatevik Sekhposyan, 2016. "Forecast Rationality Tests in the Presence of Instabilities, with Applications to Federal Reserve and Survey Forecasts," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(3), pages 507-532, April.
    4. Lillian R. Gaeto & Sandeep Mazumder, 2019. "Measuring the Accuracy of Federal Reserve Forecasts," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 85(3), pages 960-984, January.
    5. Thomas L. Hogan, 2022. "The calculus of dissent: Bias and diversity in FOMC projections," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 191(1), pages 105-135, April.
    6. Chang, Andrew C. & Hanson, Tyler J., 2016. "The accuracy of forecasts prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 23-43.
    7. 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.
    8. Barbara Rossi, 2021. "Forecasting in the Presence of Instabilities: How We Know Whether Models Predict Well and How to Improve Them," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 59(4), pages 1135-1190, December.
    9. 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.
    10. Ellis, Michael A. & Liu, Dandan, 2013. "Do FOMC forecasts add value to staff forecasts?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 332-340.
    11. Henning Fischer & Marta García-Bárzana & Peter Tillmann & Peter Winker, 2014. "Evaluating FOMC forecast ranges: an interval data approach," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 47(1), pages 365-388, August.
    12. 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.
    13. Julien Champagne & Guillaume Poulin-Bellisle & Rodrigo Sekkel, 2018. "Evaluating the Bank of Canada Staff Economic Projections Using a New Database of Real-Time Data and Forecasts," Staff Working Papers 18-52, Bank of Canada.
    14. Arai, Natsuki & Iizuka, Nobuo & Yamamoto, Yohei, 2024. "The efficiency of the Japanese government’s revenue projections," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 244(C).
    15. Bennani, Hamza & Romelli, Davide, 2024. "Exploring the informativeness and drivers of tone during committee meetings: The case of the Federal Reserve," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).
    16. Barbara Rossi, 2013. "Exchange Rate Predictability," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 51(4), pages 1063-1119, December.
    17. 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.
    18. Matei Demetrescu & Christoph Hanck & Robinson Kruse‐Becher, 2022. "Robust inference under time‐varying volatility: A real‐time evaluation of professional forecasters," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 37(5), pages 1010-1030, August.
    19. Knüppel, Malte & Schultefrankenfeld, Guido, 2019. "Assessing the uncertainty in central banks’ inflation outlooks," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(4), pages 1748-1769.
    20. Rossi, Barbara & Sekhposyan, Tatevik, 2011. "Understanding models' forecasting performance," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 164(1), pages 158-172, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    FOMC; Individual Projections; Regional Influence; Policy Preference; Forecast Efficiency;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods
    • E43 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects
    • E47 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:gwc:wpaper:2025-003. 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: GW Economics Department (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/pfgwuus.html .

    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.