time of election to facilitate the re-election of the government, and it may publish excessively pessimistic growth … forecasts during the years prior to the election to justify an expansionary monetary policy before the election. Our sample … covers six central banks which have published growth forecasts in the period from 1998 to 2008 with forecast horizons from …

the models on "lightly-revised" data instead of using data from the latest-available vintage. Forecast accuracy is … estimation are of a similar maturity to the data in the forecast loss function. The size of the expected reductions in mean …