Are professional macroeconomic forecasters able to do better than forecasting trends?

Abstract:

This paper investigates whether survey forecasters are able to make more accurate forecasts than simply supposing that the future values of the variable will move monotonically to the long‐run expectation. We consider the forecasts individually, and the consensus forecasts. Consensus survey forecasts are able to do so to varying degrees depending on the variable, but this ability is largely limited to forecasts of the current quarter.