ODU’s Wagner Invited to Participate in Survey of Professional Forecasters

October 15, 2013

Gary Wagner

Old Dominion University economics professor Gary Wagner, an associate with ODU's Economic Forecasting Project, has been invited to participate in the Survey of Professional Forecasters, a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia initiative that seeks to produce consensus macroeconomic forecasts for the United States every quarter.

Wagner, who has been with ODU since 2011, is the first member of the Economic Forecasting Project team invited to serve as a panelist for the national survey. He began work with the national survey in June.

Wagner will participate in the survey every quarter, but will be recognized in the fourth-quarter forecast produced by the group in November. The survey preserves the anonymity of individual forecasters by acknowledging them only once per year.

The survey itself is comprehensive, producing national forecasts for variables covering gross domestic product, employment, T-bill and bond rates, housing starts and a number of Consumer Price Index measures.

The Survey of Professional Forecasters is the oldest quarterly survey of macroeconomic forecasts in the United States. It began in 1968 and was conducted by the American Statistical Association and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia took over the survey in 1990.

The Survey of Professional Forecasters' Web page offers the actual releases, documentation, and mean and median forecasts of all the respondents, as well as the individual responses from each economist. The individual responses are kept confidential by using identification numbers.

See the latest Survey of Professional Forecasters economic projections (delivered in August) for the United States HERE.

ODU's Economic Forecasting Project, led by Vinod Agarwal, professor of economics, produces widely respected annual and quarterly reports for the Hampton Roads region and the country. It is regarded as an accurate harbinger of the economic times ahead.

Wagner is a public finance specialist who explores the motivation and consequences of government policies and institutions. The majority of his academic research has empirically examined the effects of state and local government fiscal institutions, with a particular focus on state rainy day funds, borrowing costs and tax structure.