Unraveling the Exogenous Forces Behind Analysts’ Macroeconomic Forecasts

Download
Keep in mind

La serie Borradores de Economía es una publicación de la Subgerencia de Estudios Económicos del Banco de la República. Los trabajos son de carácter provisional, las opiniones y posibles errores son responsabilidad exclusiva del autor y sus contenidos no comprometen al Banco de la República ni a su Junta Directiva.

Autor o Editor
De Castro-Valderrama, Marcela
Forero-Alvarado, Santiago
Moreno-Arias, Nicolás
Naranjo-Saldarriaga, Sara

The series Borradores de Economía (Working Papers on Economics) contributes to the dissemination and promotion of the work by researchers from the institution. On multiple occasions, these works have been the result of collaborative work with individuals from other national or international institutions. This series is indexed at Research Papers in Economics (RePEc). The opinions contained in this document are the sole responsibility of the author and do not commit Banco de la República or its Board of Directors.

Fecha de publicación

Abstract

Modern macroeconomics focuses on the identification of the primitive exogenous forces generating business cycles. This is at odds with macroeconomic forecasts collected through surveys, which are about endogenous variables. To address this divorce, our paper uses a semi-structural  general equilibrium model as a multivariate filter to infer the shocks behind economic analysts’ forecasts and thus, unravel their implicit macroeconomic stories. By interpreting all analysts’ forecasts through the same lenses, it is possible to understand the differences between projected endogenous  variables as differences in the types and magnitudes of shocks. It also allows to explain market’s uncertainty about the future in terms of analysts’ disagreement about these shocks. The usefulness of the approach is illustrated by adapting the canonical SOE semi-structural model in Carabenciov et al. (2008a) to Colombia and then using it to filter forecasts of its Central Bank’s Monthly Expectations Survey during the COVID-19 crisis.