Derrick Kanngiesser and Tim Willems

This post describes a systematic way for central banks to employ past forecasts (and associated errors) with the aim of learning more about the structure and functioning of the economy, ultimately to enable a better setting of monetary policy going forward. Results suggest that the Monetary Policy Committee's (MPC's) inflation forecast has tended to underestimate pass-through from wage growth to inflation, while also underestimating the longer-term disinflationary impact of higher unemployment. Regarding the effects of monetary policy, our findings suggest that transmission through inflation expectations has played a bigger role than attributed to it in the forecast.