Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) Consensus Forecasts (ICPSR 22683)

Version Date: Jun 10, 2008

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Principal Investigator(s):
William T. Gavin, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; Geetanjali Pande, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR22683.v1

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Summary

In November 2007, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announced a change in the way it communicates its view of the economic outlook: It increased the frequency of its forecasts from two to four times per year, and it increased the length of the forecasting horizon from two to three years. The FOMC does not release the individual members' forecasts or standard measures of consensus such as the mean or median. Rather, it continues to release the forecast information as a range of forecasts, both the full range between the high and the low and a central tendency that omits the extreme values. This paper uses individual forecaster data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) to mimic the FOMC's method for creating their central tendency. The authors show that the midpoint of the central tendency of the SPF is a reliable measure of the consensus, suggesting that the FOMC reporting method is also a reliable measure of consensus. For the dates when both are available, the authors also compare the relative forecast accuracy of the FOMC and SPF consensus forecasts for output growth and inflation. Overall, the differences in forecast accuracy are too small to be statistically significant.

Citation

Gavin, William T., and Pande, Geetanjali. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) Consensus Forecasts. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2008-06-10. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR22683.v1

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Funding

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Research Division

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Data Collection Notes

  1. (1) The data are distributed as a Microsoft Excel file, which contains the data and tables used in the publication. (2) These data are part of ICPSR's Publication-Related Archive and are distributed exactly as they arrived from the data depositor. ICPSR has not checked or processed this material. Users should consult the investigators if further information is desired.

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Original Release Date

2008-06-10

Version History

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
  • Gavin, William T., and Geetanjali Pande. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) Consensus Forecasts. ICPSR22683-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2008-06-10. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR22683.v1
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Notes

  • These data are flagged as replication datasets and are distributed exactly as they arrived from the data depositor. ICPSR has not checked or processed this material. Users should consult the investigator(s) if further information is desired.

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.