Asymmetric Loss in the Greenbook and the Survey of Professional Forecasters

This paper examines forecast rationality of the Greenbook and the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) under asymmetric loss functions, using the method proposed by Elliott, Komunjer and Timmermann (2005) with a rolling window strategy. Over rolling periods, the degree and direction of asymmetry in forecast loss function are time-varying. While rationality under symmetric loss is often rejected, forecast rationality under asymmetric loss is not rejected over nearly all rolling periods. Besides, real output growth is consistently under-predicted in 1990s and inflation rate is consistently over-predicted in 1980s and 1990s. Generally, inflation forecast, especially for long horizon, exhibits greater level of loss asymmetry in magnitude and frequency. The loss asymmetry of real output growth forecast is more pronounced when the last revised vintage data is used rather than real-time vintage is used. All of these results similarly hold in Greenbook and SPF. The results are also similar with different sets of instrumental variables for estimation of the asymmetric loss and for forecast rationality test.