The following list contains academic articles that either discuss or use the data generated by the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). This survey was started by Victor Zarnowitz at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the staffs at the NBER and the American Statistical Association (ASA). The survey was commonly referred to as the ASA-NBER Survey in the academic literature. The name was changed when the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia took over responsibility for the survey. Good background articles on the early years of the survey as well as the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s current role are contained in Zarnowitz (1968) and Croushore and Stark (2019), Economic Insights, “Fifty Years of the Survey of Professional Forecasters.”

The Survey of Professional Forecasters is just one of the time series used in empirical research on the formation of macroeconomic expectations. Other important series are the Livingston Survey, also conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers. A page similar to this one and related to research that uses the Livingston Survey is also available.

The following bibliography consists of all papers we know of that use SPF data. Any help with this page would be greatly appreciated. All correspondence and questions can be directed to PHIL.SPF@phil.frb.org.

Sources using data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters include:

Ang, Andrew, Geert Bekaert, and Min Wei. "Do Macro Variables, Asset Markets, or Surveys Forecast Inflation Better?," Journal of Monetary Economics 54 (2007), pp. 1163–212.

Baghestani, Hamid. "Are Professional Forecasts of Growth in U.S. Business Investment Rational?," Economics Letters 114 (2012), pp. 132–5.

Baghestani, Hamid. "Federal Reserve and Private Forecasts of Growth in Investment," Journal of Economics and Business 63 (2011), pp. 290–305.

Baghestani, Hamid. "Survey Evidence on Forecast Accuracy of U.S. Term Spreads," Review of Financial Economics 18 (2009), pp. 156–62.

Baghestani, Hamid. "Federal Reserve vs. Private Information: Who Is the Best Unemployment Rate Predictor?," Journal of Policy Modeling 30 (2008), pp. 101–10.

Baghestani, Hamid. "Federal Reserve vs. Private Forecasts of Real Net Exports," Economics Letters 91 (2006), pp. 349–53.

Baghestani, Hamid. "An Evaluation of the Professional Forecasts of U.S. Long-Term Interest Rates," Review of Financial Economics 15 (2006), pp. 177–91.

Baghestani, Hamid. "On the Rationality of Professional Forecasts of Corporate Bond Yield Spread," Applied Economics Letters 12 (2005) pp. 213–6.

Baghestani, Hamid. "Evaluating Multiperiod Survey Forecasts of Real Net Exports," Economics Letters 44 (1994), pp. 267–72.

Baghestani, Hamid, and Ashraf Khallaf. "Predictions of Growth in U.S. Corporate Profits: Asymmetric vs. Symmetric Loss," International Review of Economics and Finance 22 (2012), pp. 222–9.

Baghestani, Hamid, and Amin Kianian. "On the Rationality of Macroeconomic Forecasts: Evidence from a Panel of Professional Forecasters," Applied Economics 25 (1993), pp. 869–78.

Ball, Laurence, and Dean Croushore. "Expectations and the Effects of Monetary Policy," Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper 98-13, June 1998, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 5344, November 1995.

Barnichon, Regis, and Christopher J. Nekarda. "The Ins and Outs of Forecasting Unemployment: Using Labor Force Flows to Forecast the Labor Market," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Fall 2012), pp. 83–131.

Bonham, Carl, and Richard H. Cohen. "To Aggregate, Pool, or Neither: Testing the Rational Expectations Hypothesis Using Survey Forecasts," Journal of Business, Economics, and Statistics 19:3 (July 2001), pp. 278–91.

Bonham, Carl, and Richard H. Cohen. "Rational Consensus Forecasts?," Journal of Economic Perspectives 14:4 (Fall 2000), pp. 228–30.

Bonham, Carl, and Richard H. Cohen. "Testing the Rationality of Price Forecasts: Comment," American Economic Review 85:1 (March 1995), pp. 284–9.

Bonham, Carl, and Richard H. Cohen. "The Rationality of Price Level Forecasts: Correct Tests Using Micro Data," Working Paper 92-4, Department of Economics, University of Hawaii at Manoa (1992).

Bonham, Carl, and Douglas C. Dacy, "In Search of a Strictly Rational Forecast," Review of Economics and Statistics 73:2 (May 1991), pp. 245–53.

Braun, Phillip A., and Ilan Yaniv. "A Case Study of Expert Judgment: Economists’ Probabilities Versus Base Rate Model Forecasts," Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 5 (1992), pp. 217–31.

Bundick, Brent, and Craig S. Hakkio. "Are Longer-Term Inflation Expectations Stable?," The Macro Bulletin, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, March 9, 2015.

Bürgi, Constantin. "Bias, Rationality, and Asymmetric Loss Functions," Economics Letters 154(C) (2017), pp. 113–6.

Bürgi, Constantin, and Tara M. Sinclair. "A Nonparametric Approach to Identifying a Subset of Forecasters That Outperforms the Simple Average," Empirical Economics 53:1 (August 2017), pp. 101–15.

Capistrán, Carlos, and Allan Timmermann. "Forecast Combination with Entry and Exit of Experts." Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 27 (October 2009), pp. 428–40.

Capistrán, Carlos and Allan Timmermann. "Disagreement and Biases in Inflation Expectations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 41 (2009), pp. 365–96.

Capistrán, Carlos, "Bias in Federal Reserve Inflation Forecasts: Is the Federal Reserve Irrational or Just Cautious?" Journal of Monetary Economics 55 (2008), pp. 1415–27.

Choy, Keen Meng, Kenneth Leong, and Anthony S. Tay. "Non-fundamental Expectations and Economic Fluctuations: Evidence from Professional Forecasts," Journal of Macroeconomics 28 (2006), pp. 446–60.

Clements, Michael P. “Are Macroeconomic Density Forecasts Informative?” International Journal of Forecasting 34 (2018), pp. 181–98.

Clements, Michael P. “Long-Run Restrictions and Survey Forecasts of Output, Consumption, and Investment,” International Journal of Forecasting 32 (2016), pp. 614–28.

Clements, Michael P. “Are Professional Macroeconomic Forecasters Able to Do Better Than Forecasting Trends?” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 47 (2015), pp. 349–81.

Clements, Michael P. “Do U.S. Macroeconomic Forecasters Exaggerate Their Differences?” Journal of Forecasting 34 (2015), pp. 649–60.

Clements, Michael P. "U.S. Inflation Expectations and Heterogeneous Loss Functions, 1968-2010," Journal of Forecasting 33 (2014), pp. 1–14.

Clements, Michael P. "Probability Distributions or Point Predictions? Survey Forecasts of U.S. Output Growth and Inflation," International Journal of Forecasting 30 (2014), pp. 99–117.

Clements, Michael P. "Forecast Uncertainty — Ex Ante and Ex Post: U.S. Inflation and Output Growth," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics 32 (2014), pp. 206–16.

Clements, Michael P. "An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Rounding on the SPF Probabilities of Decline and Output Growth Histograms," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 43:1 (2011), pp. 207–20.

Clements, Michael P. "Explanations of the Inconsistencies in Survey Respondents' Forecasts," European Economic Review 54 (2010), pp. 536–49.

Clements, Michael P. "Internal Consistency of Survey Respondents' Forecasts: Evidence Based on the Survey of Professional Forecasters," in Jennifer L. Castle and Neil Shephard, eds., The Methodology and Practice of Econometrics: A Festschrift in Honour of David F. Hendry. Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 206–66.

Clements, Michael P. "Consensus and Uncertainty: Using Forecast Probabilities of Output Declines," International Journal of Forecasting 24 (2008), pp. 76–86.

Clements, Michael P. "Evaluating the Survey of Professional Forecasters' Probability Distributions of Expected Inflation Based on Derived Event Probability Forecasts," Empirical Economics 31:1 (2006), pp. 49–64.

Clements, Michael P., and Ana B. Galvao. "Model and Survey Estimates of the Term Structure of U.S. Macroeconomic Uncertainty," International Journal of Forecasting 33 (2017), pp. 591–604.

Clements, Michael P., and David I. Harvey. "Forecast Encompassing Tests and Probability Forecast," Journal of Applied Econometrics 25 (2010), pp. 1028–62.

Croushore, Dean. "Evaluating Inflation Forecasts," Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper 98-14, June 1998.

Croushore, Dean. "Inflation Forecasts: How Good Are They?" Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Business Review (May/June 1996), pp. 15–25.

Croushore, Dean, and Tom Stark. “Fifty Years of the Survey of Professional Forecasters," Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Economic Insights (Fourth Quarter 2019), pp. 1–11.

Davies, Antony. "A Framework for Decomposing Shocks and Measuring Volatilities Derived from Multi-Dimensional Panel Data of Survey Forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting 22:2 (April/June 2006), pp. 373–93.

Davies, Antony, and Kajal Lahiri. "Rational Expectations Revisited," in Cheng Hsiao, M. Hashem Pesaran, Kajal Lahiri, and Lung Fei Lee, eds., Analysis of Panels and Limited Dependent Variable Models. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Diebold, Francis X., Todd A. Gunther, and Anthony S. Tay. "Evaluating Density Forecasts with Applications to Financial Risk Management," International Economic Review 39 (1998), pp. 863–83.

Diebold, Francis X., Anthony S. Tay, and Kenneth F. Wallis. "Evaluating Density Forecasts: The Survey of Professional Forecasters," in Robert F. Engle and Halbert White, eds., Cointegration, Causality, and Forecasting: A Festschrift in Honour of Clive W. J. Granger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Dua, Pami, and Subash C. Ray. "ARIMA Models of the Price Level: An Assessment of the Multilevel Adaptive Learning Process in the USA," Journal of Forecasting 11 (1992), pp. 507–16.

Engelberg, Joseph, Charles F. Manski, and Jared Williams. "Comparing the Point Predictions and Subjective Probability Distributions of Professional Forecasters," Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 27 (2009), pp. 30–41.

Fair, Ray C. "Analyzing Macroeconomic Forecastability," Unpublished manuscript, Yale University, May 2009.

Fair, Ray C., and Robert J. Shiller. "The Informational Content of Ex Ante Forecasts," Review of Economics and Statistics 71 (1989), pp. 325–31.

Francis, Jack Clark and Jian Hua. "Forecasting Yield Curves With Survey Information," Unpublished manuscript, Baruch College, Department of Economics and Finance.

Ganics, Gergely, Barbara Rossi, and Tatevik Sekhposyan. “From Fixed-event to Fixed-horizon Density Forecasts: Obtaining Measures of Multi-Horizon Uncertainty from Survey Density Forecasts,” Unpublished manuscript, December 10, 2019.

Giordani, Paolo, and Paul Söderlind. "Inflation Forecast Uncertainty," European Economic Review 47 (2003), pp. 1037–59.

Graham, John R. "Is a Group of Economists Better Than One? Than None?" Journal of Business 69 (1996), pp. 193–232.

Grishchenko, Olesya V., and Jing-zhi (Jay) Huang. "The Inflation Risk Premium: Evidence from the TIPS Market," Journal of Fixed Income 22:4 (2013), pp. 5–30.

Guzman, Giselle. "Internet Search Behavior as an Economic Forecasting Tool: The Case of Inflation Expectations," Journal of Economic and Social Measurement 36 (December 2011): pp. 119–67.

Guzman, Giselle. "An Inflation Expectations Horserace," Unpublished manuscript. Columbia University, January 2010.

Hafer, R. W., and Scott E. Hein. "On the Accuracy of Time-Series, Interest Rate, and Survey Forecasts of Inflation," Journal of Business 58 (1985), pp. 377–98.

Henzel, Steffen. "Fitting Survey Expectations and Uncertainty About Trend Inflation," Journal of Macroeconomics 35:1 (2013), 172–85.

Jeong, Jinook, and G. S. Maddala. "Testing the Rationality of Survey Data Using the Weighted Double-Bootstrapped Method of Moments," Review of Economics and Statistics 78 (1996), pp. 296–302.

Jones, Charles M. "Aggregate Stock Returns and Revisions in Expected Cash Flows," Manuscript, Department of Economics, Princeton University (1995).

Jose, Victor Richmond R., Yael Grushka-Cockayne, and Kenneth C. Lichtendahl, Jr. "Trimmed Opinion Pools and the Crowd's Calibration Problem," forthcoming in Management Science.

Keane, Michael P., and David E. Runkle. "Testing the Rationality of Price Forecasts: New Evidence From Panel Data," American Economic Review 80 (1990), pp. 714–35.

Keane, Michael P., and David E. Runkle. "Are Economic Forecasts Rational?" Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review (Spring 1989), pp. 26–33.

Kolasa, Marcin, Michal Rubaszek, and Pawel Skrzypczynski. "Putting the New Keynesian DSGE Model to the Real-Time Forecasting Test," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 44 (October 2012), pp. 1301–24.

Konchitchki, Yaniv. "Accounting and the Macroeconomy: The Case of Aggregate Price-Level Effects on Individual Stocks," Financial Analysts Journal, 2013 (forthcoming).

Konchitchki, Yaniv, and Panos N. Patatoukas. "Taking the Pulse of the Real Economy Using Financial Statement Analysis: Implications for Macro Forecasting and Stock Valuation," Accounting Review 89 (March 2014), pp. 669–94.

Konchitchki, Yaniv, and Panos N. Patatoukas. "Accounting Earnings and Gross Domestic Product," Journal of Accounting and Economics 57 (February 2014), pp. 76–88.

Konchitchki, Yaniv, Yan Luo, Mary L.Z. Ma, and Feng Wu. “Accounting-Based Downside Risk, Cost of Capital, and the Macroeconomy,” Review of Accounting Studies 21:1 (March 2016), pp. 1–36.

Lahiri, Kajal and T.S. Chun. "Some Tests for Unbiasedness in the Long Run Using Survey Data," International Economic Journal 3 (Summer 1989), pp. 27–42.

Lahiri, Kajal, George Monokroussos, and Yongchen Zhao. "The Yield Spread Puzzle and the Information Content of SPF Forecasts," Economics Letters 118 (2013), pp. 219–21.

Lahiri, Kajal, Christie Teigland, and Mark Zaporowski. "Interest Rates and the Subjective Probability Distribution of Inflation Forecasts," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 20 (1988), pp. 233–48.

Lahiri, Kajal, and Christie Teigland. "On the Normality of Probability Distributions of Inflation and GNP Forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting 3 (1987), pp. 269–79.

Lahiri, Kajal, and Christie Teigland. "On the Rationality of ASA-NBER Survey Data on Expectations," in Proceedings of the Business and Economic Statistics Section (American Statistical Association, August 16–19, 1982), pp. 448–51.

Lahiri, Kajal and J. George Wang. "Evaluating Probability Forecasts for GDP Declines Using Alternative Methodologies," International Journal of Forecasting 29 (2013), pp. 175–90.

Lahiri, Kajal and Xuguang Simon Sheng. "Measuring Forecast Uncertainty by Disagreement: The Missing Link," Journal of Applied Econometrics 25 (2010), pp. 514–538.

Lichtendahl Jr, Kenneth C, Yael Grushka-Cockayne, and Robert L. Winkler. "Is It Better to Average Probabilities or Quantiles?," forthcoming in Management Science.

Liu, Yang and Xuguang Simon Sheng. “The Measurement and Transmission of Macroeconomic Uncertainty: Evidence from the U.S. and BRIC Countries,” International Journal of Forecasting 35 (2019), pp. 967–979.

McNees, Stephen K., and Lauren K. Fine. "Diversity, Uncertainty, and Accuracy of Inflation Forecasts," Federal Reserve Bank of Boston New England Economic Review (July/August 1994), pp. 34–44.

McNees, Stephen K. "How Large Are Economic Forecast Errors?" Federal Reserve Bank of Boston New England Economic Review (July/August 1992), pp. 25–41.

Neumark, David, and Jonathan S. Leonard. "Inflation Expectations and the Structural Shift in Aggregate Labor-Cost Determination in the 1980's," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 25 (1993), pp. 786–800.

Patatoukas, Panos N. "Detecting News in Aggregate Accounting Earnings: Implications for Stock Market Valuation," Review of Accounting Studies, (March 2013).

Pennacchi, George G. "Identifying the Dynamics of Real Interest Rates and Inflation: Evidence Using Survey Data," Review of Financial Studies 4 (1991), pp. 53–86.

Poncela, P. and E. Senra. "A Two Factor Model to Combine US Inflation Forecast," Applied Economics 2006(38), pp. 2191–7.

Poncela, P., J. Rodriguez, R.S. Mangas, and E. Senra. "Forecast Combination Through Dimension Reduction Techniques," International Journal of Forecasting 2011(27), pp. 224–37.

Rhim, Jong C., Mohammed F. Khayum, and Timothy J. Schibik. "Composite Forecasts of Inflation: An Improvement in Forecasting Performance," Journal of Economics and Finance 18 (1994), pp. 275–86.

Rich, Robert, and Joseph Tracy. "The Relationships Among Expected Inflation, Disagreement, and Uncertainty: Evidence from Matched Point and Density Forecasts," Review of Economics and Statistics 92:1 (2010), pp. 200–7.

Rossi, Barbara, and Tatevik Sekhposyan. "Macroeconomic Uncertainty Indices Based on Nowcast and Forecast Error Distributions," American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings 105:5 (2015), pp. 650–5.

Rossi, Barbara, and Tatevik Sekhposyan. "Forecast Rationality Tests in the Presence of Instabilities, with Applications to Federal Reserve and Survey Forecasts," Journal of Applied Econometrics (2015).

Rossi, Barbara, and Tatevik Sekhposyan. "Alternative Tests for Correct Specification of Conditional Forecast Densities," Barcelona GSE Working Paper No. 758, 2015, available at http://www.econ.upf.edu/~brossi/RossiSekhposyan2014.pdf.

Rossi, Barbara, and Tatevik Sekhposyan. "Conditional Predictive Density Evaluation in the Presence of Instabilities," Journal of Econometrics 177(2), (December 2013), 199–212.

Rubaszek, Michal, and Pawel Skrzypczynski. "On the Forecasting Performance of a Small-Scale DSGE Model," International Journal of Forecasting 24 (2008), pp. 498–512.

Rudin, Jeremy R. "What Do Private Agents Believe About the Time Series Properties of GNP?" Canadian Journal of Economics 25 (May 1992), pp. 369–91.

Shoja, Mehdi, and Ehsan S. Soofi. "Uncertainty, Information, and Disagreement of Economic Forecasters," Special Issue: In Honor of Esfandiar Maasoumi, Econometric Reviews 36:6-9 (2017), pp. 796–817.

Sims, Christopher A. "The Role of Models and Probabilities in the Monetary Policy Process," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (2002), pp. 1–62.

Smith, Gregor W., and James Yetman. "The Curse of Irving Fisher (Professional Forecasters' Version)," Queen's University Economics Department Working Paper No. 1144, November 2007.

Smith, Michael S., and Shaun Vahey. "Asymmetric Forecast Densities for U.S. Macroeconomic Variables from a Gaussian Copula Model of Cross-Sectional and Serial Dependence," University of Melbourne, Melbourne Business School Working Paper, January 2015.

Su, Vincent, and Josephine Su. "An Evaluation of ASA/NBER Business Outlook Survey Forecasts," Explorations in Economic Research 2 (1975), pp. 588–618.

Throop, Adrian W. "An Evaluation of Alternative Measures of Expected Inflation," Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Review (Summer 1988), pp. 27–43.

Wallis, Kenneth F. "Chi-Squared Tests of Interval and Density Forecasts, and the Bank of England's Fan Charts," International Journal of Forecasting 19 (2003), pp. 165–75.

Zarnowitz, Victor, and Phillip Braun. "Twenty-Two Years of the NBER-ASA Quarterly Economic Outlook Surveys: Aspects and Comparisons of Forecasting Performance," in James H. Stock and Mark W. Watson, eds., Business Cycles, Indicators, and Forecasting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 11–94.

Zarnowitz, Victor, and Louis A. Lambros. "Consensus and Uncertainty in Economic Prediction," Journal of Political Economy 95 (1987), pp. 591–621

Zarnowitz, Victor. "Rational Expectations and Macroeconomic Forecasts," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics 3 (October 1985), pp. 293–311.

Zarnowitz, Victor. "An Analysis of Annual and Multiperiod Quarterly Forecasts of Aggregate Income, Output, and the Price Level," Journal of Business 52 (1979), pp. 1–33.

Zarnowitz, Victor. "The New ASA-NBER Survey of Forecasts by Economic Statisticians," in A Supplement to National Bureau Report 4 (National Bureau of Economic Research, December, 1968), pp. 1–8.

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