FOMC Forecasts: Are They Useful for Understanding Monetary Policy?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Monetary policy is forward looking and, in its pursuit of transparency, it communicates its economic projections to the public at large. As a result, there is interest in whether these projections are credible. We argue that central to that credibility is the public’s ability to replicate the FOMC’s projections using publicly available data only. In other words, is it possible to anticipate, reliably and independently, what the FOMC will anticipate for the federal funds rate? To address this question, we assemble FOMC projections from 1992 to 2017; examine their statistical properties; postulate models to predict FOMC projections; and estimate the parameters of these models. We are not arguing that the FOMC determines their projections using these models. Rather, these equations are the ones that the public could use to forecast FOMC forecasts and to anticipate interest-rate decisions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.075 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".