Reconsidering the Fed's Forecasting Advantage

Previous studies show the Fed has a forecast advantage over the private sector, either because it devotes more resources to forecasting or because it has an informational advantage in knowing the path of future monetary policy. We evaluate the Fed’s forecast advantage to determine how much of it results from the Fed’s knowledge of the conditioning path. We develop two tests—an instrumental variable encompassing test and a path-dependent encompassing test—to equalize the Fed’s information set with the private sector’s. We find that, generally, the Fed does not encompass the private sector when the latter has knowledge of the future of monetary policy. Further, we find that between 20 and 30 percent of the difference between the Fed’s average mean squared forecast error and the private sector’s can be explained by monetary policy