Is monetary policy important for forecasting real growth and inflation?

We hypothesize that if monetary policy is important in explaining movements in output and inflation then it should follow that more accurate forecasts of monetary policy, on average, will tend to produce more accurate forecasts of growth and inflation. Using data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters we find that improved monetary policy forecast accuracy corresponds to lower variance of forecast errors for growth and inflation but very little reduction in the overall average size of forecast errors for growth and inflation. (c) 2005 Society for Policy Modeling. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.