Previous empirical studies on the of economic and financial forecasts generally test for generic properties such as bias or autocorrelated errors but provide only limited insight into the behavior behind inefficient forecasts. This paper tests for a specific form of forecast bias. In particular, we examine whether expert consensus forecasts of monthly economic releases are systematically biased toward the value of previous months strategic incentives. We find broad-based and significant evidence for this form of bias, which in some cases results in sizable predictable forecast errors. To investigate whether market participants expectations are influenced by this bias, we examine interest rate reactions to economic news. We find that bond yields react only to the residual, or unpredictable, component of the forecast error and not to the component induced by anchoring, suggesting that expectations of market participants anticipate this bias embedded in expert forecasts.
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Volume (Year): 44 (2009) Issue (Month): 02 (April) Pages: 369-390 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Frederic S. Mishkin, 1983.
"Are Market Forecasts Rational?,"
NBER Chapters,
in: A Rational Expectations Approach to Macroeconomics: Testing Policy Ineffectiveness and Efficient-Markets Models, pages 59-75
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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