IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/chb/bcchwp/630.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Jaque Mate a las Proyecciones de Consenso

Author

Listed:
  • Pablo Pincheira B.
  • Nicolás Fernández

Abstract

In this article we analyze bias and autocorrelation properties of inflation forecast errors coming from the surveys carried out by Consensus Economics. We consider monthly forecasts for Chile, México and Brazil as well as quarterly forecasts for the US, Canada, Sweden and Japan. Our sample spans the period from March 2002 to June 2008. We consider forecasts at several predictive horizons. Our results indicate the existence of excessive autocorrelation and bias in forecast errors, which is not consistent with optimality under quadratic loss. We also explore whether these findings of excessive autocorrelation and bias enable us to build new and more accurate inflation forecasts. We evaluate these new forecasts in an out-of sample exercise and find that they are more accurate in the cases of Chile, Mexico, Brazil and the US. For Canada, our results are mixed depending on the forecasting horizon. For Sweden and Japan, however, the new forecasts display lower accuracy. It is worth mentioning that in the best case, our new forecasts display a 45% reduction in the Mean Squared Prediction Error.

Suggested Citation

  • Pablo Pincheira B. & Nicolás Fernández, 2011. "Jaque Mate a las Proyecciones de Consenso," Working Papers Central Bank of Chile 630, Central Bank of Chile.
    • Handle: RePEc:chb:bcchwp:630
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bcentral.cl/documents/33528/133326/DTBC_630.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jacob A. Mincer & Victor Zarnowitz, 1969. "The Evaluation of Economic Forecasts," NBER Chapters, in: Economic Forecasts and Expectations: Analysis of Forecasting Behavior and Performance, pages 3-46, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Raffaella Giacomini & Halbert White, 2006. "Tests of Conditional Predictive Ability," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 74(6), pages 1545-1578, November.
    3. Pablo Pincheira & Roberto Álvarez, 2012. "Evaluation of Short Run Inflation Forecasts in Chile," Working Papers Central Bank of Chile 674, Central Bank of Chile.
    4. Capistrán, Carlos, 2008. "Bias in Federal Reserve inflation forecasts: Is the Federal Reserve irrational or just cautious?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(8), pages 1415-1427, November.
    5. Loungani, Prakash, 2001. "How accurate are private sector forecasts? Cross-country evidence from consensus forecasts of output growth," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 419-432.
    6. Bentancor, Andrea & Pincheira, Pablo, 2010. "Predicción de errores de proyección de inflación en Chile," El Trimestre Económico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, vol. 0(305), pages 129-154, enero-mar.
    7. Croushore Dean, 2010. "An Evaluation of Inflation Forecasts from Surveys Using Real-Time Data," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 10(1), pages 1-32, May.
    8. Ang, Andrew & Bekaert, Geert & Wei, Min, 2007. "Do macro variables, asset markets, or surveys forecast inflation better?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(4), pages 1163-1212, May.
    9. Carlos Bowles & Roberta Friz & Veronique Genre & Geoff Kenny & Aidan Meyler & Tuomas Rautanen, 2007. "The ECB survey of professional forecasters (SPF) – A review after eight years’ experience," Occasional Paper Series 59, European Central Bank.
    10. Clemen, Robert T., 1989. "Combining forecasts: A review and annotated bibliography," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 559-583.
    11. Patton, Andrew J. & Timmermann, Allan, 2007. "Properties of optimal forecasts under asymmetric loss and nonlinearity," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 140(2), pages 884-918, October.
    12. Joutz, Fred & Stekler, H. O., 2000. "An evaluation of the predictions of the Federal Reserve," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 17-38.
    13. Capistrán, Carlos & López-Moctezuma, Gabriel, 2010. "Las expectativas macroeconómicas de los especialistas. Una evaluación de pronósticos de corto plazo en México," El Trimestre Económico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, vol. 0(306), pages 275-312, abril-jun.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pablo Pincheira, 2012. "A Joint Test of Superior Predictive Ability for Chilean Inflation Forecasts," Journal Economía Chilena (The Chilean Economy), Central Bank of Chile, vol. 15(3), pages 04-39, December.
    2. Alfredo Pistelli M., 2012. "Análisis de Sesgos y Eficiencia en Proyecciones de Consensus Forecasts," Notas de Investigación Journal Economía Chilena (The Chilean Economy), Central Bank of Chile, vol. 15(1), pages 98-104, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Pablo Pincheira, 2012. "A Joint Test of Superior Predictive Ability for Chilean Inflation Forecasts," Journal Economía Chilena (The Chilean Economy), Central Bank of Chile, vol. 15(3), pages 04-39, December.
    2. Pincheira, Pablo & Hardy, Nicolas, 2022. "Correlation Based Tests of Predictability," MPRA Paper 112014, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Pincheira, Pablo & Hardy, Nicolas, 2021. "The Mean Squared Prediction Error Paradox," MPRA Paper 107403, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Pablo Pincheira, 2010. "A Real Time Evaluation of the Central Bank of Chile GDP Growth Forecasts," Money Affairs, CEMLA, vol. 0(1), pages 37-73, January-J.
    5. Capistrán, Carlos & López-Moctezuma, Gabriel, 2014. "Forecast revisions of Mexican inflation and GDP growth," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 177-191.
    6. Faust, Jon & Wright, Jonathan H., 2013. "Forecasting Inflation," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 2-56, Elsevier.
    7. Andrea Betancor & Pablo Pincheira, 2008. "Forecasting Inflation Forecast Errors," Working Papers Central Bank of Chile 477, Central Bank of Chile.
    8. Pablo Pincheira & Carlos A. Medel, 2012. "Forecasting Inflation with a Simple and Accurate Benchmark: a Cross-Country Analysis," Working Papers Central Bank of Chile 677, Central Bank of Chile.
    9. Fildes, Robert & Stekler, Herman, 2002. "The state of macroeconomic forecasting," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 24(4), pages 435-468, December.
    10. Xie, Zixiong & Hsu, Shih-Hsun, 2016. "Time varying biases and the state of the economy," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 716-725.
    11. Bespalova, Olga, 2018. "Forecast Evaluation in Macroeconomics and International Finance. Ph.D. thesis, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA," MPRA Paper 117706, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    12. Matei Demetrescu & Christoph Hanck & Robinson Kruse‐Becher, 2022. "Robust inference under time‐varying volatility: A real‐time evaluation of professional forecasters," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 37(5), pages 1010-1030, August.
    13. Rossi, Barbara, 2013. "Advances in Forecasting under Instability," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1203-1324, Elsevier.
    14. Conflitti, Cristina & De Mol, Christine & Giannone, Domenico, 2015. "Optimal combination of survey forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 1096-1103.
    15. Berge, Travis J., 2018. "Understanding survey-based inflation expectations," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 788-801.
    16. Dovern, Jonas & Jannsen, Nils, 2017. "Systematic errors in growth expectations over the business cycle," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 760-769.
    17. Barbara Rossi, 2019. "Forecasting in the presence of instabilities: How do we know whether models predict well and how to improve them," Economics Working Papers 1711, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Jul 2021.
    18. Carlos A. Medel, 2018. "Forecasting Inflation with the Hybrid New Keynesian Phillips Curve: A Compact-Scale Global VAR Approach," International Economic Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(3), pages 331-371, July.
    19. Barbara Rossi & Atsushi Inoue, 2012. "Out-of-Sample Forecast Tests Robust to the Choice of Window Size," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(3), pages 432-453, April.
    20. Dean Croushore, 2012. "Forecast bias in two dimensions," Working Papers 12-9, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:chb:bcchwp:630. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alvaro Castillo (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bccgvcl.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.