Multimodality and mixture distributions: an application to a Survey of Economic Expectations

In this article we present the Silverman multimodality test and mixture distributions methodology, applying both approaches to the Survey of Economic Expectations of the Central Bank of Chile. The main results reflect the importance of a permanent monitoring of the complete distributions and not just central tendency meausures as is the practice in many central banks currently. We find that the forecasts of the private professional forecasters have systematically been in line with the inflation targeting range, although during episodes where the effective inflation proved to be outside the target range.