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Forecasting professional forecasters

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Author Info
Eric Ghysels
Jonathan H. Wright

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Abstract

Survey of forecasters, containing respondents' predictions of future values of growth, inflation and other key macroeconomic variables, receive a lot of attention in the financial press, from investors, and from policy makers. They are apparently widely perceived to provide useful information about agents' expectations. Nonetheless, these survey forecasts suffer from the crucial disadvantage that they are often quite stale, as they are released only infrequently, such as on a quarterly basis. In this paper, we propose methods for using asset price data to construct daily forecasts of upcoming survey releases, which we can then evaluate. Our methods allow us to estimate what professional forecasters would predict if they were asked to make a forecast each day, making it possible to measure the effects of events and news announcements on expectations. We apply these methods to forecasts for several macroeconomic variables from both the Survey of Professional Forecasters and Consensus Forecasts.

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Paper provided by Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) in its series Finance and Economics Discussion Series with number 2006-10.

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Date of creation: 2006
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Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2006-10

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Related research
Keywords: Economic forecasting;

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This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: 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.:
  1. Martin D.D. Evans, 2005. "Where Are We Now? Real-Time Estimates of the Macro Economy," NBER Working Papers 11064, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  2. Graham Elliott, 2005. "Estimation and Testing of Forecast Rationality under Flexible Loss," Review of Economic Studies, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 72(4), pages 1107-1125, October. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Andrew Ang & Geert Bekaert & Min Wei, 2006. "Do macro variables, asset markets, or surveys forecast inflation better?," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2006-15, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
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  4. Christina D. Romer & David H. Romer, 2000. "Federal Reserve Information and the Behavior of Interest Rates," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(3), pages 429-457, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Owen Lamont, 1995. "Macroeconomics Forecasts and Microeconomic Forecasters," NBER Working Papers 5284, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  6. Dean Croushore, 1993. "Introducing: the survey of professional forecasters," Business Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, issue Nov, pages 3-15. [Downloadable!]
  7. Froot, Kenneth A, 1989. " New Hope for the Expectations Hypothesis of the Term Structure of Interest Rates," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 44(2), pages 283-305, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  8. Eric Ghysels & Pedro Santa-Clara & Rossen Valkanov, 2004. "Predicting Volatility: Getting the Most out of Return Data Sampled at Different Frequencies," CIRANO Working Papers 2004s-19, CIRANO. [Downloadable!]
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  9. Bernanke, Ben S. & Gertler, Mark & Waston, Mark, 1997. "Systematic Monetary Policy and the Effects of Oil Price Shocks," Working Papers 97-25, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University. [Downloadable!]
  10. Ehrbeck, Tilman & Waldmann, Robert, 1996. "Why Are Professional Forecasters Biased? Agency versus Behavioral Explanations," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 111(1), pages 21-40, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  11. Eric Ghysels & Pedro Santa-Clara & Rossen Valkanov, 2004. "The MIDAS Touch: Mixed Data Sampling Regression Models," CIRANO Working Papers 2004s-20, CIRANO. [Downloadable!]
  12. Andrew Atkeson & Lee E. Ohanian., 2001. "Are Phillips curves useful for forecasting inflation?," Quarterly Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, issue Win, pages 2-11. [Downloadable!]
  13. James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 1989. "New Indexes of Coincident and Leading Economic Indicators," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1989, Volume 4, pages 351-409 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!]
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  14. Michael P. Keane & David E. Runkle, 1998. "Are Financial Analysts' Forecasts of Corporate Profits Rational?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 106(4), pages 768-805, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  15. David M. Cutler & James M. Poterba & Lawrence H. Summers, 1989. "What Moves Stock Prices?," NBER Working Papers 2538, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  16. Christoph Schleicher, 2003. "Kolmogorov-Wiener Filters for Finite Time Series," Computing in Economics and Finance 2003 109, Society for Computational Economics.
  17. Domenico Giannone & Lucrezia Reichlin & David Small, 2005. "Nowcasting GDP and inflation: the real-time informational content of macroeconomic data releases," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2005-42, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
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  18. Eric Ghysels & Pedro Santa-Clara & Rossen Valkanov, 2004. "There is a Risk-Return Tradeoff After All," NBER Working Papers 10913, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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(explanations, 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.)

  1. Charles Engel & John H. Rogers, 2008. "Expected consumption growth from cross-country surveys: implications for assessing international capital markets," International Finance Discussion Papers 949, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Clements, Michael P & Galvão, Ana Beatriz, 2006. "Macroeconomic Forecasting with Mixed Frequency Data : Forecasting US output growth and inflation," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 773, University of Warwick, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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