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Franses, Philip Hans and McAleer, Michael and Legerstee, Rianne (2011) Evaluating Macroeconomic Forecasts: A Review of Some Recent Developments. [ Documentos de trabajo del Instituto Complutense de Análisis Económico (ICAE); nº 11, 2011, ] (Unpublished)
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Official URL: http://eprints.ucm.es/12615/
Abstract
Macroeconomic forecasts are frequently produced, widely published, intensively discussed and comprehensively used. The formal evaluation of such forecasts has a long research history. Recently, a new angle to the evaluation of forecasts has been addressed, and in this review we analyse some recent developments from that perspective. The literature on forecast evaluation predominantly assumes that macroeconomic forecasts are generated from econometric models. In practice, however, most macroeconomic forecasts, such as those from the IMF, World Bank, OECD, Federal Reserve Board, Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and the ECB, are typically based on econometric model forecasts jointly with human intuition. This seemingly inevitable combination renders most of these forecasts biased and, as such, their evaluation becomes non-standard. In this review, we consider the evaluation of two forecasts in which: (i) the two forecasts are generated from two distinct econometric models; (ii) one forecast is generated from an econometric model and the other is obtained as a combination of a model and intuition; and (iii) the two forecasts are generated from two distinct (but unknown) combinations of different models and intuition. It is shown that alternative tools are needed to compare and evaluate the forecasts in each of these three situations. These alternative techniques are illustrated by comparing the forecasts from the (econometric) Staff of the Federal Reserve Board and the FOMC on inflation, unemployment and real GDP growth. It is shown that the FOMC does not forecast significantly better than the Staff, and that the intuition of the FOMC does not add significantly in forecasting the actual values of the economic fundamentals. This would seem to belie the purported expertise of the FOMC.
Item Type: | Working Paper or Technical Report |
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Additional Information: | JEL Classifications: C22, C51, C52, C53, E27, E37. |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Macroeconomic forecasts, Econometric models, Human intuition, Biased forecasts, Forecast performance, Forecast evaluation, Forecast comparison. |
Subjects: | Social sciences > Economics > Econometrics Social sciences > Economics > Macroeconomics |
Series Name: | Documentos de trabajo del Instituto Complutense de Análisis Económico (ICAE) |
Volume: | 2011 |
Number: | 11 |
ID Code: | 12615 |
Deposited On: | 26 Apr 2011 08:48 |
Last Modified: | 12 Mar 2014 10:59 |
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