آیا پیش بینی FOMC ارزشی به پیش بینی کارکنان اضافه می کند؟

This paper compares the economic forecasts of members of the Board of Governors and presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks, and then investigates the value of each group's forecasts in supplementing the forecasts of the Board of Governors' staff. We find that the presidents tend to forecast higher inflation and real GDP growth, and lower unemployment than the members of the Board of Governors. We also find that the presidents' real GDP and unemployment rate forecasts add value to the real economy forecasts of the staff, while the governors' inflation forecasts add value to the staff's inflation forecasts.

Four times a year, members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and the presidents of Federal Reserve Banks prepare economic forecasts prior to meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).1 These forecasts supplement the forecasts prepared by the Board of Governors staff. Romer and Romer (2008) report that FOMC forecasts, which they measure as the midpoint of the central tendency,2 do not add value to the forecasts prepared by the Board of Governors staff in general. According to their results, when the FOMC considers forecasts of inflation and the unemployment rate as they deliberate policy decisions, they should put a weight of essentially zero on the FOMC forecasts and essentially one on the staff forecasts, even though the weights they should put on FOMC and staff real GDP forecasts are less clear cut. Furthermore, they provide evidence that the differences between FOMC forecasts and the staff forecasts are a source of monetary policy shocks, suggesting that FOMC forecasts not only provide no additional useful information to staff forecasts, but also can lead to inappropriate monetary policy decisions.3

This paper uses the available data on individual FOMC forecasts to investigate differences between the forecasts of members of the Board of Governors and the presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks. Given the relatively small sample size, our conclusions are tentative. Nevertheless, the results document some potentially important differences in the forecasts of the members of the Board of Governors and presidents of Federal Reserve Banks, suggesting that the commonly used measure of FOMC forecasts, based on the central tendency, can be misleading when assessing the value of FOMC forecasts. The results show that the presidents tend to forecast greater inflation risks than the governors, as they tend to forecast higher inflation and real GDP growth, and lower unemployment than the governors.