IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/gwi/wpaper/2008-06.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Can the Fed Predict the State of the Economy?

Author

Listed:
  • Tara Sinclair
  • Frederick L. Joutz

    (Department of Economics/Institute for International Economic Policy, George Washington University
    Department of Economics, George Washington University)

Abstract

Recent research has documented that the Federal Reserve produces systematic errors in forecasting inflation, real GDP growth, and the unemployment rate, even though these forecasts are unbiased. We show that these systematic errors reveal that the Fed is surprised by real and inflationary cycles. Using a modified Mincer-Zarnowitz regression, we show that the Fed knows the state of the economy for the current quarter, but cannot predict it one quarter ahead.

Suggested Citation

  • Tara Sinclair & Frederick L. Joutz, 2009. "Can the Fed Predict the State of the Economy?," Working Papers 2008-06, The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy.
  • Handle: RePEc:gwi:wpaper:2008-06
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.gwu.edu/~iiep/assets/docs/papers/Sinclair_IIEPWP2008-6.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jacob A. Mincer & Victor Zarnowitz, 1969. "The Evaluation of Economic Forecasts," NBER Chapters, in: Economic Forecasts and Expectations: Analysis of Forecasting Behavior and Performance, pages 3-46, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Capistrán, Carlos, 2008. "Bias in Federal Reserve inflation forecasts: Is the Federal Reserve irrational or just cautious?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(8), pages 1415-1427, November.
    3. Karen E. Dynan & Douglas W. Elmendorf, 2001. "Do provisional estimates of output miss economic turning points?," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2001-52, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    4. Swanson, Norman R. & van Dijk, Dick, 2006. "Are Statistical Reporting Agencies Getting It Right? Data Rationality and Business Cycle Asymmetry," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 24, pages 24-42, January.
    5. Graham Elliott & Ivana Komunjer & Allan Timmermann, 2008. "Biases in Macroeconomic Forecasts: Irrationality or Asymmetric Loss?," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(1), pages 122-157, March.
    6. Holden, K & Peel, D A, 1990. "On Testing for Unbiasedness and Efficiency of Forecasts," The Manchester School of Economic & Social Studies, University of Manchester, vol. 58(2), pages 120-127, June.
    7. 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.
    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. Tara M. Sinclair & H.O. Stekler, 2011. "Differences in Early GDP Component Estimates Between Recession and Expansion," Working Papers 2011-05, The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy.
    2. Sinclair, Tara M. & Stekler, H.O., 2013. "Examining the quality of early GDP component estimates," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 736-750.
    3. Döpke, Jörg & Fritsche, Ulrich & Müller, Karsten, 2019. "Has macroeconomic forecasting changed after the Great Recession? Panel-based evidence on forecast accuracy and forecaster behavior from Germany," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 62(C).
    4. Dovern, Jonas & Jannsen, Nils, 2017. "Systematic errors in growth expectations over the business cycle," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 760-769.
    5. Lixiong Yang, 2020. "State-dependent biases and the quality of China’s preliminary GDP announcements," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 59(6), pages 2663-2687, December.
    6. Eicher, Theo S. & Kuenzel, David J. & Papageorgiou, Chris & Christofides, Charis, 2019. "Forecasts in times of crises," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 1143-1159.
    7. Xie, Zixiong & Hsu, Shih-Hsun, 2016. "Time varying biases and the state of the economy," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 716-725.
    8. Tara M. Sinclair & Fred Joutz & Herman O. Stekler, 2008. "Are 'unbiased' forecasts really unbiased? Another look at the Fed forecasts," Working Papers 2008-010, The George Washington University, Department of Economics, H. O. Stekler Research Program on Forecasting.
    9. 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.
    10. Sinclair, Tara M., 2019. "Characteristics and implications of Chinese macroeconomic data revisions," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 1108-1117.
    11. Fred Joutz & Michael P. Clements & Herman O. Stekler, 2007. "An evaluation of the forecasts of the federal reserve: a pooled approach," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 22(1), pages 121-136.
    12. Sinclair, Tara M. & Stekler, H.O. & Carnow, Warren, 2015. "Evaluating a vector of the Fed’s forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 157-164.
    13. Behrens, Christoph, 2020. "German trade forecasts since 1970: An evaluation using the panel dimension," Working Papers 26, German Research Foundation's Priority Programme 1859 "Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour", Humboldt University Berlin.
    14. Hamid Baghestani, 2013. "Evaluating Federal Reserve predictions of growth in consumer spending," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(13), pages 1637-1646, May.
    15. Capistrán, Carlos, 2008. "Bias in Federal Reserve inflation forecasts: Is the Federal Reserve irrational or just cautious?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(8), pages 1415-1427, November.
    16. Patrick Schmidt & Matthias Katzfuss & Tilmann Gneiting, 2021. "Interpretation of point forecasts with unknown directive," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(6), pages 728-743, September.
    17. Tsuchiya, Yoichi, 2023. "Assessing the World Bank’s growth forecasts," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 64-84.
    18. 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.
    19. Constantin Burgi, 2016. "What Do We Lose When We Average Expectations?," Working Papers 2016-013, The George Washington University, Department of Economics, H. O. Stekler Research Program on Forecasting.
    20. Ericsson, Neil R., 2017. "How biased are U.S. government forecasts of the federal debt?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 543-559.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Forecast Evaluation; Federal Reserve; Systematic Errors; Recessions;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods
    • E37 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications
    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies

    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:gwi:wpaper:2008-06. 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: Kyle Renner (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iigwuus.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.