The Greenbook of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (called the Greenbook for short) is a book with projections of various economic indicators for the

economy of the United States The United States is a highly developed mixed-market economy and has the world's largest nominal GDP and net wealth. It has the second-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP) behind China. It has the world's seventh-highest per capita GD ...

produced by the

Federal Reserve Board The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, commonly known as the Federal Reserve Board, is the main governing body of the Federal Reserve System. It is charged with overseeing the Federal Reserve Banks and with helping implement the mon ...

before each meeting of the

Federal Open Market Committee The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), a committee within the Federal Reserve System (the Fed), is charged under United States law with overseeing the nation's open market operations (e.g., the Fed's buying and selling of United States Treasur ...

. The projections are referred to as Greenbook projections or Greenbook forecasts. Many of the variables projected coincide with variables covered in the

Survey of Professional Forecasters The Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) is a quarterly survey of macroeconomic forecasts for the economy of the United States issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. It is the oldest such survey in the United States. The survey i ...

Details

Prior to each meeting of the

, projections are made about macroeconomic indicators for the

. The meetings are held at a frequency slightly greater than one a month. These projections are recorded in "Greensheets" and all the Greensheets for a given year are compiled into the Greenbook of that year. The Greensheets are kept confidential within the committee at the time of creation. Each Greenbook is made available to the public five years after the end of the year of the Greenbook. For instance, as of April 2014, Greenbooks from 1966 to 2008 are available on the website of the

Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia — also known as the Philadelphia Fed or the Philly Fed — headquartered at 10 Independence Mall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is responsible for the Third District of the Federal Reserve, which covers ...

. A Greenbook data set in

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, Android (operating system), Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro (comp ...

format is also available on the

website. This includes only four quarterly Greenbook projections in order to maximize the correspondence and comparability with the

. In addition to the main projections, supplementary documents describing the output gap and financial assumptions made in the projections are also available on the

website.

Reception

Academic reception

Some academic publications by the

have looked at the historical track record of accuracy of the Greenbook projections as well as their output gap estimates. The Greenbook forecast has also attracted the attention of outside academic researchers. A 2007

National Bureau of Economic Research The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic c ...

paper by Faust and Wright finds: "For inflation we find that univariate methods are dominated by the best atheoretical large dataset methods and that these, in turn, are dominated by Greenbook. For GDP growth, in contrast, we find that once one takes account of Greenbook's advantage in evaluating the current state of the economy, neither large dataset methods nor the Greenbook process offers much advantage over a univariate autoregressive forecast." A 2014 paper by Arai in the ''

International Journal of Forecasting The ''International Journal of Forecasting'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal on forecasting. It is published by Elsevier on behalf of the International Institute of Forecasters. Its objective is to "unify the field of forecasting an ...

'' finds: "Using this atton and Timmerman (2012) forecast adjustmentmethod in a real-time out-of-sample forecasting exercise, I find that it provides modest improvements in the accuracies of the forecasts for the GDP deflator and CPI, but not for other variables. The improvements are statistically significant in some cases, with magnitudes of up to 18% in root mean square prediction error."

References

External links

* {{official website, http://www.philadelphiafed.org/research-and-data/real-time-center/greenbook-data/ (for Greenbook Data Sets) Economic forecasting