Greenbook Forecasts Research Articles

Discussion

Discussion

The Determinants of Disagreement between the FOMC and the Fed's Staff: New Insights Based on a Counterfactual Interest Rate

We examine the degree and sources of disagreement between the members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and the Federal Reserve's (Fed's) staff about the appropriate policy rate for the period 1994-2011. For that purpose, we compute a recommended interest rate for the Fed's staff based on its own Greenbook forecasts and a time-varying monetary policy rule a la Taylor (1993), and compare it with the actual target rate. First, we find that there has been persistent internal disagreement between FOMC members and the Fed's staff about the appropriate policy rate. Second, we reveal that members with an occupational background in finance favor a relatively more hawkish monetary policy. In addition, a preference towards a tighter monetary policy is found under a Democratic President and during Alan Greenspan's tenure as the Fed's Chairman. Finally, higher oil prices, a low degree of uncertainty, and episodes of financial stability are also associated with higher interest rates as compared to the Fed staff's recommendation.

News, Real-Time Forecasts, and the Price Puzzle

This paper revisits the effects of news shocks in the context of an otherwise standard New Keynesian dynamic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. We use the U.S. real-time forecasts from the Federal Reserve's Green Book to model agents' and the central bank's expectations of future macroeconomic outcomes. We show that unlike with the ex post data where the identification of news shocks is driven by the modeling assumptions, the identification strategy that relies on the Greenbook forecasts ascribes a larger role to news shocks in explaining variation in the model's endogenous variables. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the presence of sizable news shocks explains the emergence of the price puzzle in the structural vector autoregressive framework.

Eliciting GDP forecasts from the FOMC’s minutes around the financial crisis

Stekler and Symington (2016) construct indexes that quantify the Federal Open Market Committee’s views about the US economy, as expressed in the minutes of the FOMC’s meetings. These indexes provide insights into the FOMC’s deliberations, especially at the onset of the Great Recession. The current paper complements Stekler and Symington’s analysis by showing that their indexes reveal relatively minor bias in the FOMC’s views when the indexes are reinterpreted as forecasts. Additionally, these indexes provide a proximate mechanism for inferring the Fed staff’s Greenbook forecasts of the US real GDP growth rate, years before the Greenbook’s public release.

Predicting Fed Forecasts

Monetary policy decisions by the Fed's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) have attracted considerable attention in recent years, especially with quantitative easing through large-scale asset purchases, the introduction of forward guidance, and December's "lift-off" after seven years of a near-zero federal funds rate. The FOMC's decisions are based in part on the Greenbook forecasts, which are economic forecasts produced by the Federal Reserve Board's staff and which are presented to the FOMC prior to their policy meetings. This note shows that the minutes of the FOMC meetings--and the information in those minutes about the Greenbook forecasts--provide valuable insights into the decision-making process of the FOMC.

The accuracy of forecasts prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee

We analyze forecasts of consumption, nonresidential investment, residential investment, government spending, exports, imports, inventories, gross domestic product, inflation, and unemployment prepared by the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee from 1997 to 2008, called the Greenbooks. We compare the root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and the proportion of directional errors of Greenbook forecasts of these macroeconomic indicators with the errors from three forecasting benchmarks: a random walk, a first-order autoregressive model, and a Bayesian model averaged forecast from a suite of univariate time-series models commonly taught to first-year economics graduate students. We estimate our forecasting benchmarks both on end-of-sample vintage and real-time vintage data. We find that Greenbook forecasts significantly outperform our benchmark forecasts for horizons less than one quarter ahead. However, by the one-year forecast horizon, typically at least one of our forecasting benchmarks performs as well as Greenbook forecasts. Greenbook forecasts of personal consumption expenditures and unemployment tend to do relatively well, while Greenbook forecasts of inventory investment, government expenditures, and inflation tend to do poorly.

The Accuracy of Forecasts Prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee

Abstract We analyze forecasts of consumption, nonresidential investment, residential investment, government spending, exports, imports, inventories, gross domestic product, inflation, and unemployment prepared by the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee from 1997 to 2008, called the Greenbooks. We compare the root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and the proportion of directional errors of Greenbook forecasts of these macroeconomic indicators with the errors from three forecasting benchmarks: a random walk, a first-order autoregressive model, and a Bayesian model averaged forecast from a suite of univariate time-series models commonly taught to first-year economics graduate students. We estimate our forecasting benchmarks both on end-of-sample vintage and real-time vintage data. We find that Greenbook forecasts significantly outperform our benchmark forecasts for horizons less than one quarter ahead. However, by the one-year forecast horizon, typically at least one of our forecasting benchmarks performs as well as Greenbook forecasts. Greenbook forecasts of personal consumption expenditures and unemployment tend to do relatively well, while Greenbook forecasts of inventory investment, government expenditures, and inflation tend to do poorly.

Eliciting GDP Forecasts from the FOMC’s Minutes Around the Financial Crisis

Stekler and Symington (2016) construct indexes that quantify the Federal Open Market Committee’s views about the U.S. economy, as expressed in the minutes of the FOMC’s meetings. These indexes provide insights on the FOMC’s deliberations, especially at the onset of the Great Recession. The current paper complements Stekler and Symington’s analysis by showing that their indexes reveal relatively minor bias in the FOMC’s views when the indexes are reinterpreted as forecasts. Additionally, these indexes provide a proximate mechanism for inferring the Fed staff’s Greenbook forecasts of the U.S. real GDP growth rate, years before the Greenbook’s public release.

The Accuracy of Forecasts Prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee

We analyze forecasts of consumption, nonresidential investment, residential investment, government spending, exports, imports, inventories, gross domestic product, inflation, and unemployment prepared by the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee from 1997 to 2008, called the Greenbooks. We compare the root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and the proportion of directional errors of Greenbook forecasts of these macroeconomic indicators to the errors from three forecasting benchmarks: a random walk, a first-order autoregressive model, and a Bayesian model averaged forecast from a suite of univariate time-series models commonly taught to first-year economics graduate students. We estimate our forecasting benchmarks both on end-of-sample vintage and real-time vintage data. We find that Greenbook forecasts significantly outperform our benchmark forecasts for horizons less than one quarter ahead. However, by the one-year forecast horizon, typically at least one of our forecasting benchmarks performs as well as Greenbook forecasts. Greenbook forecasts of the personal consumption expenditures and unemployment tend to do relatively well, while Greenbook forecasts of inventory investment, government expenditures, and inflation tend to do poorly.

What can we learn from revisions to the Greenbook forecasts?

Although there have been many evaluations of the Federal Reserve’s Greenbook forecasts, we analyze them in a different dimension. We examine the revisions of these forecasts in the context of fixed event predictions to determine how new information is incorporated in the forecasting process. This analysis permits us to determine if there was an inefficient use of information in the sense that the forecast revision has predictive power for the forecast error. Research on forecast smoothing suggests that we might find a positive relationship between the forecast error and the forecast revision. Although we do find for some variables and horizons the Fed’s forecast errors are predictable from its forecast revisions, there is no evidence of forecast smoothing. Instead the revisions sometimes have a negative relationship with the forecast error, suggesting in these cases that the Fed may be over-responsive to new information.

Forecast Rationality Tests in the Presence of Instabilities, with Applications to Federal Reserve and Survey Forecasts

This paper proposes a framework to implement regression-based tests of predictive ability in unstable environments, including, in particular, forecast unbiasedness and efficiency tests, commonly referred to as tests of forecast rationality. Our framework is general: it can be applied to model-based forecasts obtained either with recursive or rolling window estimation schemes, as well as to forecasts that are model free. The proposed tests provide more evidence against forecast rationality than previously found in the Federal Reserve's Greenbook forecasts as well as survey-based private forecasts. It confirms, however, that the Federal Reserve has additional information about current and future states of the economy relative to market participants. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Fiscal Policy: Ex Ante and Ex Post

The surge in fiscal deficits since 2008 has put a renewed focus on our understanding of fiscal policy. The interaction of fiscal and monetary policy during this period has also been the subject of much discussion and analysis. This paper gives new insight into past fiscal policy and its influence on monetary policy by examining the U.S. Federal Reserve Board staff’s Greenbook forecasts of fiscal policy. The authors create a real-time database of the Greenbook forecasts of fiscal policy, examine the forecast performance in terms of bias and efficiency, and explore the implications for the interaction of fiscal policy and monetary policy. The authors also attempt to provide advice for fiscal policy by showing how policymakers learn over time about the trajectory of the U.S. federal government’s fiscal balance as well as the changing roles of structural and cyclical factors.

Time Varying Forecasting Performance of the Federal Reserve

We investigate how the forecasting performance of the Federal Reserve Greenbooks has changed relative to commercial forecasters between 1974 and 2009. To this end, we analyze time ‐‑ variation in the Greenbook coefficients in forecast encompassing regressions. Assuming that model coefficients change continuously, we estimate unobserved components models using Bayesian inference techniques. To verify that our results do not depend on the specific way change is modeled, we also allow the coefficients to change discretely rather than continuously and test for structural breaks using classical inference techniques. We find that the Greenbook forecasts have been consistently superior to the commercial forecasts at all horizons throughout our sample period. Although the forecasting performance gap has narrowed at more distant horizons after the early ‐‑ to ‐‑ mid 1980s, it remains significant.

Evaluating the economic forecasts of FOMC members

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the forecasts of real GDP, inflation and unemployment made by individual members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) for the period 1992–2003. Despite a general tendency for the committee members to underpredict real GDP over the sample period, we find evidence suggesting that the FOMC has a considerable amount of information about output growth, beyond what is known by commercial forecasters. We also document a substantial level of variation in the members’ forecasts, which can be explained in part by the differences in economic conditions between Federal Reserve districts. The members’ heterogeneous forecasts for output growth and inflation contain useful information for explaining their preferred policy settings, beyond that in the Greenbook forecasts.

Where is the Fed in the distribution of forecasters?

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.

Using forecast evaluation to improve the accuracy of the Greenbook forecast

Recently, Patton and Timmermann (2012) proposed a more powerful kind of forecast efficiency regression at multiple horizons, and showed that it provides evidence against the efficiency of the Fed’s Greenbook forecasts. I use their forecast efficiency evaluation to propose a method for adjusting the Greenbook forecasts. Using this method in a real-time out-of-sample forecasting exercise, I find that it provides modest improvements in the accuracies of the forecasts for the GDP deflator and CPI, but not for other variables. The improvements are statistically significant in some cases, with magnitudes of up to 18% in root mean square prediction error.

DSGE Model-Based Forecasting

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models use modern macroeconomic theory to explain and predict comovements of aggregate time series over the business cycle and to perform policy analysis. We explain how to use DSGE models for all three purposes – forecasting, story-telling, and policy experiments – and review their forecasting record. We also provide our own real-time assessment of the forecasting performance of the Smets and Wouters (2007) model data up to 2011, compare it with Blue Chip and Greenbook forecasts, and show how it changes as we augment the standard set of observables with external information from surveys (nowcasts, interest rates, and long-run inflation and output growth expectations). We explore methods of generating forecasts in the presence of a zero-lower-bound constraint on nominal interest rates and conditional on counterfactual interest rate paths. Finally, we perform a post-mortem of DSGE model forecasts of the Great Recession, and show that forecasts from a version of the Smets–Wouters model augmented by financial frictions and with interest rate spreads as an observable compare well with Blue Chip forecasts.

Inflation forecasts and core inflation measures: Where is the information on future inflation?

• We compare the inflation forecast errors from the Greenbook, SPF and core inflation measures to a random walk model. • Forecasts from a random walk model are poor. • Greenbook forecasts no longer consistently maintain their information advantage. • The weighted median and trimmed mean do provide valuable information about the tendency of prices in the medium run. • The weighted median and trimmed mean provide information similar to the information in the Greenbook forecasts. This paper uses the forecast from a random walk model of inflation as a benchmark to test and compare the forecast performance of several alternatives of future inflation, including the Greenbook forecast by the Fed staff, the Survey of Professional Forecasters median forecast, CPI inflation minus food and energy, CPI weighted median inflation, and CPI trimmed mean inflation. The Greenbook forecast was found in previous literature to be a better forecast than other private sector forecasts. Our results indicate that both the Greenbook and the Survey of Professional Forecasters median forecasts of inflation and core inflation measures may contain better information than forecasts from a random walk model. The Greenbook's superiority appears to have declined against other forecasts and core inflation measures.

Federal Reserve Forecasts: Asymmetry and State-Dependence

We jointly test the rationality of the Federal Reserve’s Greenbook forecasts of inflation, unemployment, and output growth using a multivariate nonseparable asymmetric loss function. We find that the forecasts are rationalizable and exhibit directional asymmetry. The degree of asymmetry depends on the phase of the business cycle: The Greenbook forecasts of output growth are too pessimistic in recessions and too optimistic in expansions. The change in monetary policy that occurred in the late 1970s has been attributed in the literature to the Fed coming to terms with the difficulties in predicting real variables. Our results offer an alternative explanation: A combination of different preferences over expansions and recessions and less frequent recessions in the latter part of the sample.

The Taylor Principle, Interest Rate Smoothing and Fed Policy in the 1970s and 1980s

Using real time estimates of output gaps or Greenbook forecasts of the unemployment rate, this article estimates Taylor-type policy rules that predict the actual behavior of the funds rate during two sample periods, 1968Q1 to 1979Q2 and 1979Q3 to 1994Q4. The inflation rate response coefficient is close to unity over the first sub-period and well above unity over the second, suggesting Fed policy violated the Taylor principle during the first period. The adjustment of the funds rate in response to fundamentals is not as rapid during the first period as it is during the second. Together these results support the conventional view that the Fed was too timid and too sluggish during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Though the Fed smoothes interest rates, the degree of smoothing exhibited is far less than what was previously estimated. The funds rate response to its fundamentals is complete within one year during the first period and within one quarter during the second.