Working Paper
Federal funds rate prediction
Abstract: We examine the forecasting performance of a range of time-series models of the daily US effective federal funds (FF) rate recently proposed in the literature. We find that: (i) most of the models and predictor variables considered produce satisfactory one-day-ahead forecasts of the FF rate; (ii) the best forecasting model is a simple univariate model where the future FF rate is forecast using the current difference between the FF rate and its target; (iii) combining the forecasts from various models generally yields modest improvements on the best performing model. These results have a natural interpretation and clear policy implications.
Keywords: Federal funds rate; Forecasting;
Access Documents
File(s): File format is application/pdf http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/more/2002-005/
Bibliographic Information
Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Part of Series: Working Papers
Publication Date: 2004
Number: 2002-005