What Has Publishing Inflation Forecasts Accomplished? Central Banks and Their Competitors

An earlier version of this paper circulated under the title: “Forecast Disagreement and the Inflation Outlook: New International Evidence” which appears as Discussion Paper 2016-E-3, Institute for Economic and Monetary Studies, Bank of Japan, March. Research for this paper was undertaken while I was National Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan. I am grateful to both for their financial support. I am also grateful to several central banks, the Bank for International Settlements, and the Bank of Japan for their assistance in providing me with some of the data collected for this study. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at an invited session of the 1 8th International Conference in Computational and Financial Econometrics (Pisa, Italy), the Japanese Centre for Economic Research, the Bank of Japan, the University of Stellenbosch and the Zürich Workshop on the Economics of Central Banking. I am also grateful to two anonymous referee for comments on earlier drafts. This chapter is prepared for the Oxford University Press Handbook of Central Banking (David Mayes, Pierre Siklos, and Jan-Egbert Sturm, Editors).

Original version of 07/2018