IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/119904.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The role of survey-based expectations in real-time forecasting of US inflation

Author

Listed:
  • Andriantomanga, Zo

Abstract

This paper performs a real-time forecasting exercise for US inflation from 1992Q1 to 2022Q2. We reinvestigate the literature on autoregressive (AR) inflation gap models - the deviation of inflation from long-run inflation expectations. The findings corroborate that, while simple models remain hard to beat, the multivariate extensions to the AR gap models can improve forecasting performance at short horizons. The results show that (i) forecast combination improves forecast accuracy over simpler models, (ii) aggregating survey measures, using dynamic principal components, improves forecast accuracy, (iii) and the additional information obtained from the error correction process between inflation and long run inflation expectations can improve forecasting performance. In spite of our models providing more accurate one-step ahead forecasts on average, fluctuation tests reveal that over unstable time periods - mainly during the GFC and the Covid-19 pandemic - the AR(1) benchmark performed better.

Suggested Citation

  • Andriantomanga, Zo, 2023. "The role of survey-based expectations in real-time forecasting of US inflation," MPRA Paper 119904, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:119904
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/119904/1/MPRA_paper_119904.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Svensson, Lars E. O., 1997. "Inflation forecast targeting: Implementing and monitoring inflation targets," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 41(6), pages 1111-1146, June.
    2. Narayan Kundan Kishor, 2021. "Forecasting real‐time economic activity using house prices and credit conditions," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(2), pages 213-227, March.
    3. Stock, James H. & Watson, Mark W., 1999. "Forecasting inflation," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 44(2), pages 293-335, October.
    4. Jan J. J. Groen & Richard Paap & Francesco Ravazzolo, 2013. "Real-Time Inflation Forecasting in a Changing World," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(1), pages 29-44, January.
    5. Jonathan H. Wright, 2009. "Forecasting US inflation by Bayesian model averaging," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(2), pages 131-144.
    6. Doepke Joerg & Dovern Jonas & Fritsche Ulrich & Slacalek Jiri, 2008. "The Dynamics of European Inflation Expectations," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 1-23, March.
    7. Joshua C.C. Chan & Todd E. Clark & Gary Koop, 2018. "A New Model of Inflation, Trend Inflation, and Long‐Run Inflation Expectations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 50(1), pages 5-53, February.
    8. Groen, Jan J.J. & Kapetanios, George & Price, Simon, 2009. "A real time evaluation of Bank of England forecasts of inflation and growth," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 74-80.
    9. Ang, Andrew & Bekaert, Geert & Wei, Min, 2007. "Do macro variables, asset markets, or surveys forecast inflation better?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(4), pages 1163-1212, May.
    10. Daniel Peña & Victor J. Yohai, 2016. "Generalized Dynamic Principal Components," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 111(515), pages 1121-1131, July.
    11. Ben S. Bernanke & Michael Woodford, 2004. "Introduction to "The Inflation-Targeting Debate"," NBER Chapters, in: The Inflation-Targeting Debate, pages 1-10, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Jeremy B. Rudd, 2022. "Why do we think that inflation expectations matter for inflation? (And should we?)," Review of Keynesian Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, vol. 10(1), pages 25-45, January.
    13. 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.
    14. Daniel Peña & Ezequiel Smucler & Victor J. Yohai, 2019. "Forecasting Multiple Time Series With One-Sided Dynamic Principal Components," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 114(528), pages 1683-1694, October.
    15. Diebold, Francis X & Mariano, Roberto S, 2002. "Comparing Predictive Accuracy," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(1), pages 134-144, January.
    16. Kirstin Hubrich & Frauke Skudelny, 2017. "Forecast Combination for Euro Area Inflation: A Cure in Times of Crisis?," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(5), pages 515-540, August.
    17. 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.
    18. Ben S. Bernanke & Michael Woodford, 2004. "The Inflation-Targeting Debate," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number bern04-1, March.
    19. Raffaella Giacomini & Barbara Rossi, 2010. "Forecast comparisons in unstable environments," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(4), pages 595-620.
    20. 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.
    21. 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.
    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. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. Bańbura, Marta & Bobeica, Elena, 2023. "Does the Phillips curve help to forecast euro area inflation?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 364-390.
    4. Chad Fulton & Kirstin Hubrich, 2021. "Forecasting US Inflation in Real Time," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 9(4), pages 1-20, October.
    5. El-Shagi, Makram, 2011. "Inflation expectations: Does the market beat econometric forecasts?," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 22(3), pages 298-319.
    6. Nima Nonejad, 2021. "An Overview Of Dynamic Model Averaging Techniques In Time‐Series Econometrics," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(2), pages 566-614, April.
    7. Macias, Paweł & Stelmasiak, Damian & Szafranek, Karol, 2023. "Nowcasting food inflation with a massive amount of online prices," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 809-826.
    8. Szafranek, Karol, 2019. "Bagged neural networks for forecasting Polish (low) inflation," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 1042-1059.
    9. Jan Prüser, 2021. "Forecasting US inflation using Markov dimension switching," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(3), pages 481-499, April.
    10. Pablo Guerróon‐Quintana & Molin Zhong, 2023. "Macroeconomic forecasting in times of crises," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 38(3), pages 295-320, April.
    11. Paul Hubert, 2015. "Revisiting the Greenbook’s relative forecasting performance," Revue de l'OFCE, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 0(1), pages 151-179.
    12. Michael McLeay & Silvana Tenreyro, 2020. "Optimal Inflation and the Identification of the Phillips Curve," NBER Macroeconomics Annual, University of Chicago Press, vol. 34(1), pages 199-255.
    13. Raffaella Giacomini & Barbara Rossi, 2013. "Forecasting in macroeconomics," Chapters, in: Nigar Hashimzade & Michael A. Thornton (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Empirical Macroeconomics, chapter 17, pages 381-408, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    14. Berge, Travis J., 2018. "Understanding survey-based inflation expectations," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 788-801.
    15. Niu, Linlin & Xu, Xiu & Chen, Ying, 2017. "An adaptive approach to forecasting three key macroeconomic variables for transitional China," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 201-213.
    16. Hauzenberger, Niko & Huber, Florian & Klieber, Karin, 2023. "Real-time inflation forecasting using non-linear dimension reduction techniques," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 901-921.
    17. Carlos Henrique Dias Cordeiro de Castro & Fernando Antonio Lucena Aiube, 2023. "Forecasting inflation time series using score‐driven dynamic models and combination methods: The case of Brazil," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(2), pages 369-401, March.
    18. Chen, Ji & Yang, Xinglin & Liu, Xiliang, 2022. "Learning, disagreement and inflation forecasting," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 63(C).
    19. Araujo, Gustavo Silva & Gaglianone, Wagner Piazza, 2023. "Machine learning methods for inflation forecasting in Brazil: New contenders versus classical models," Latin American Journal of Central Banking (previously Monetaria), Elsevier, vol. 4(2).
    20. Rossi, Barbara, 2013. "Advances in Forecasting under Instability," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1203-1324, Elsevier.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Inflation; survey forecasts; forecast combination; inflation expectations; error correction; real-time data;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E37 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications

    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:pra:mprapa:119904. 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: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.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.