In order to make forward‐looking policy decisions, the Fed relies on imperfect forecasts of future macroeconomic conditions. If the Fed’s forecasts are rational, then the difference between the actual outcome and the Fed’s forecast is exogenous to the information set of the Fed at the time the forecast was produced. We investigate the effect of the Fed’s forecast errors on output and price movements under the assumption that the Fed intends to implement policy through a forward‐looking Taylor rule with perfect foresight. Our results suggest that although the mean absolute magnitude of the Fed’s forecast errors is large, the impact on the macroeconomy is reassuringly small, although the impact is larger when we take into consideration the Fed’s inability to forecast recessions.

中文翻译：

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美联储的预测错误重要吗？*

为了做出前瞻性的政策决定，美联储依赖对未来宏观经济状况的不完善的预测。如果美联储的预测是合理的，那么实际结果与美联储预测之间的差异就在于产生该预测之时的美联储信息集。在美联储打算通过具有完美远见的前瞻性泰勒规则实施政策的假设下，我们调查了美联储预测误差对产出和价格变动的影响。我们的结果表明，尽管美联储预测误差的平均绝对幅度很大，但对宏观经济的影响却令人放心，尽管当我们考虑到美联储无力预测经济衰退时，影响会更大。