Some argue that central banks can improve monetary policy by including confidential supervisory assessments of banking organizations in their forecasts of inflation and unemployment. In this study we examine the extent to which forecasts of these variables would have been improved with the...

Summary Government agencies and other national and international institutions are asked to perform forecasts over the medium term. In particular, the EU Stability and Growth Pact contains the obligation to formulate stability programmes over four years, covering a general economic outlook as...

Government agencies and other national and international institutions are asked to perform forecasts over the medium term. In particular, the EU Stability and Growth Pact contains the obligation to formulate stability programmes over four years, covering a general economic outlook as well as the...

Artículo de revista ; The average annual growth rate of GDP can be formulated algebraically as a weighted average of the quarter-on-quarter growth rates of the preceding and the current year. Sometimes this can give rise to counterintuitive results and misinterpretations of how the economy is...

The paper derives a test for equal predictability of multi-step-ahead system forecasts that is invariant to linear transformations. The test is a multivariate version of the Diebold-Mariano test. An invariant metric for multi-step-ahead system forecasts is necessary as the conclusions otherwise...

Central banks, private banks, statistical agencies and international organizations such as the IMF and OECD typically use information about the exchange rate some weeks before the publication date as the basis for their exchange rate forecasts. In this paper, we test if forecasts can be made...

We propose a novel framework to gauge the credibility of central banks' commitment to an inflation-targeting regime. Our framework combines survey data on macroeconomic forecasts with high-frequency financial market data to understand how inflation targeting makes economic agents change their...

Our paper examines the accuracy of growth and inflation forecasts for 19 countries, published by the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany's Joint Diagnosis, or FERI, a private German forecaster, during 2001-2015. Despite dismal accuracy...

This paper documents the presence of systematic bias in the real GDP and inflation forecasts of private sector forecasters in the G7 economies in the years 1990-2005. The data come from the monthly Consensus Economics forecasting service, and bias is measured and tested for significance using...

Government agencies and other national and international institutions are asked to perform forecasts over the medium term. In particular, the EU Stability and Growth Pact contains the obligation to formulate stability programmes over four years, covering a general economic outlook as well as the...