In this paper we jointly evaluate the Federal Reserve staff forecasts of U.S. real output growth and the inflation rate, assuming that the forecasts are to be used as inputs for the Taylor rule. Our simple methodology generates “policy forecast errors” which have a direct interpretation for...

We document information rigidity in forecasts of real GDP growth in 46 countries over the past two decades. We also investigate: (i) whether rigidities differ across countries, particularly between advanced countries and emerging markets; (ii) whether rigidities are lower around turning points...

Previous research on defining and measuring consensus (agreement) among forecasters has been concerned with the evaluation of forecasts of continuous variables. This previous work is not relevant when the forecasts involve binary decisions: up-down or win-lose. In this paper we use Cohen's kappa...