Search Results
Report
The FRBNY staff underlying inflation gauge: UIG
Monetary policymakers and long-term investors would benefit greatly from a measure of underlying inflation that uses all relevant information, is available in real time, and forecasts inflation better than traditional underlying inflation measures such as core inflation measures. This paper presents the ?FRBNY Staff Underlying Inflation Gauge (UIG)? for CPI and PCE. Using a dynamic factor model approach, the UIG is derived from a broad data set that extends beyond price series to include a wide range of nominal, real, and financial variables. It also considers the specific and time-varying ...
Working Paper
Constructing Fan Charts from the Ragged Edge of SPF Forecasts
We develop models that take point forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) as inputs and produce estimates of survey-consistent term structures of expectations and uncertainty at arbitrary forecast horizons. Our models combine fixed-horizon and fixed-event forecasts, accommodating time-varying horizons and availability of survey data, as well as potential inefficiencies in survey forecasts. The estimated term structures of SPF-consistent expectations are comparable in quality to the published, widely used short-horizon forecasts. Our estimates of time-varying forecast ...
Working Paper
Perceptions about Monetary Policy
We estimate perceptions about the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy rule from panel data on professional forecasts of interest rates and macroeconomic conditions. The perceived dependence of the federal funds rate on economic conditions varies substantially over time, including over the monetary policy cycle. Forecasters update their perceptions about the Fed’s policy rule in response to monetary policy actions, measured by high-frequency interest rate surprises, suggesting that they have imperfect information about this rule. Monetary policy perceptions matter for monetary transmission, ...
Working Paper
On the Aggregation of Probability Assessments: Regularized Mixtures of Predictive Densities for Eurozone Inflation and Real Interest Rates
We propose methods for constructing regularized mixtures of density forecasts. We explore a variety of objectives and regularization penalties, and we use them in a substantive exploration of Eurozone inflation and real interest rate density forecasts. All individual inflation forecasters (even the ex post best forecaster) are outperformed by our regularized mixtures. From the Great Recession onward, the optimal regularization tends to move density forecasts’ probability mass from the centers to the tails, correcting for overconfidence.
Discussion Paper
Why Do Forecasters Disagree about Their Monetary Policy Expectations?
While forecasters generally disagree about the expected path of monetary policy, the level of disagreement as measured in the New York Fed’s Survey of Primary Dealers (SPD) has increased substantially since 2022. For instance, the dispersion of expectations about the future path of the target federal funds rate (FFR) has widened significantly. What explains the current elevated disagreement in FFR forecasts?
Report
Is There Hope for the Expectations Hypothesis?
Most macroeconomic models impose a tight link between expected future short rates and the term structure of interest rates via the expectations hypothesis (EH). While systematically rejected in the data, existing work evaluating the EH generally assumes either full-information rational expectations or stationarity of beliefs, or both. As such, these analyses are ill-equipped to refute the EH when these assumptions fail to hold, leaving the door open for a “resurrection” of the EH. We introduce a model of expectations formation which features time-varying means and accommodates deviations ...
Report
Fundamental disagreement
We use the term structure of disagreement of professional forecasters to document a novel set of facts: (1) forecasters disagree at all horizons, including the long run; (2) the term structure of disagreement differs markedly across variables: it is downward sloping for real output growth, relatively flat for inflation, and upward sloping for the federal funds rate; (3) disagreement is time-varying at all horizons, including the long run. These new facts present a challenge to benchmark models of expectation formation based on informational frictions. We show that these models require two ...
Report
The term structure of expectations and bond yields
Bond yields can be decomposed into expected short rates and term premiums. We directly measure the former using all available U.S. professional forecasts and obtain the latter as the difference between bond yields and survey-based expected short rates. While the behavior of nominal and real short rate expectations is consistent with standard macroeconomic theory, term premiums account for the bulk of the cross-sectional and time series variation in yields. They also largely explain the yield curve's reaction to a host of structural economic shocks. This dramatic failure of the expectations ...
Working Paper
Modeling Time-Varying Uncertainty of Multiple-Horizon Forecast Errors
We develop uncertainty measures for point forecasts from surveys such as the Survey of Professional Forecasters, Blue Chip, or the Federal Open Market Committee?s Summary of Economic Projections. At a given point of time, these surveys provide forecasts for macroeconomic variables at multiple horizons. To track time-varying uncertainty in the associated forecast errors, we derive a multiple-horizon specification of stochastic volatility. Compared to constant-variance approaches, our stochastic-volatility model improves the accuracy of uncertainty measures for survey forecasts.
Working Paper
News-driven uncertainty fluctuations
We embed a news shock, a noisy indicator of the future state, in a two-state Markov-switching growth model. Our framework, combined with parameter learning, features rich history-dependent uncertainty dynamics. We show that bad news that arrives during a prolonged economic boom can trigger a ?Minsky moment??a sudden collapse in asset values. The effect is greatly amplified when agents have a preference for early resolution of uncertainty. We leverage survey recession probability forecasts to solve a sequential learning problem and estimate the full posterior distribution of model primitives. ...