IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/boi/wpaper/2020.11.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do Expert Experience and Characteristics Affect Inflation Forecasts?

Author

Listed:
  • Jonathan Benchimol

    (Bank of Israel)

  • Makram El-Shagi

    (Henan University)

  • Yossi Saadon

    (Bank of Israel)

Abstract

Each person's characteristics may influence that person's behaviors and their outcomes. We build and use a new database to estimate experts' performance and boldness based on their experience and characteristics. We classify experts providing inflation forecasts based on their education, experience, gender, and environment. We provide alternative interpretations of factors affecting experts' inflation forecasting performance, boldness, and pessimism by linking behavioral economics, the economics of education, and forecasting literature. An expert with previous experience at a central bank appears to have a lower propensity for predicting deflation.

Suggested Citation

  • Jonathan Benchimol & Makram El-Shagi & Yossi Saadon, 2020. "Do Expert Experience and Characteristics Affect Inflation Forecasts?," Bank of Israel Working Papers 2020.11, Bank of Israel.
    • Handle: RePEc:boi:wpaper:2020.11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://boiwebrepec.azurefd.net/RePEc/boi/wpaper/WP_2020.11.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2020
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. N. Bloom, 2016. "Fluctuations in uncertainty," Voprosy Ekonomiki, NP Voprosy Ekonomiki, issue 4.
    2. Carola Binder, 2020. "Coronavirus Fears and Macroeconomic Expectations," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(4), pages 721-730, October.
    3. 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.
    4. Cornand, Camille & Hubert, Paul, 2020. "On the external validity of experimental inflation forecasts: A comparison with five categories of field expectations," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 110(C).
    5. Pedro Bordalo & Nicola Gennaioli & Yueran Ma & Andrei Shleifer, 2020. "Overreaction in Macroeconomic Expectations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 110(9), pages 2748-2782, September.
    6. Camille Cornand & Paul Hubert, 2020. "On the external validity of experimental inflation forecasts," Post-Print hal-02894262, HAL.
    7. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2012. "What Can Survey Forecasts Tell Us about Information Rigidities?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 120(1), pages 116-159.
    8. Andrade, Philippe & Le Bihan, Hervé, 2013. "Inattentive professional forecasters," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(8), pages 967-982.
    9. Coibion, Olivier & Gorodnichenko, Yuriy & Kumar, Saten & Pedemonte, Mathieu, 2020. "Inflation expectations as a policy tool?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(C).
    10. Malmendier, Ulrike & Nagel, Stefan & Yan, Zhen, 2021. "The making of hawks and doves," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 19-42.
    11. Carlos Capistr¡N & Allan Timmermann, 2009. "Disagreement and Biases in Inflation Expectations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 41(2-3), pages 365-396, March.
    12. Davis, Mark & Lleo, Sébastien, 2020. "Debiased expert forecasts in continuous-time asset allocation," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 113(C).
    13. Duca-Radu, Ioana & Kenny, Geoff & Reuter, Andreas, 2021. "Inflation expectations, consumption and the lower bound: Micro evidence from a large multi-country survey," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 120-134.
    14. El-Shagi, Makram & Giesen, Sebastian & Jung, Alexander, 2016. "Revisiting the relative forecast performances of Fed staff and private forecasters: A dynamic approach," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 313-323.
    15. Batchelor, Roy, 2007. "Bias in macroeconomic forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 23(2), pages 189-203.
    16. Jeppe Christoffersen & Simone Stæhr, 2019. "Individual risk tolerance and herding behaviors in financial forecasts," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 25(5), pages 1348-1377, November.
    17. Jacob A. Mincer, 1974. "Introduction to "Schooling, Experience, and Earnings"," NBER Chapters, in: Schooling, Experience, and Earnings, pages 1-4, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. N. E. Breslow & N. Chatterjee, 1999. "Design and analysis of two‐phase studies with binary outcome applied to Wilms tumour prognosis," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 48(4), pages 457-468.
    19. Jeffrey Zwiebel, 1995. "Block Investment and Partial Benefits of Corporate Control," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 62(2), pages 161-185.
    20. Carvalho, Carlos & Nechio, Fernanda, 2014. "Do people understand monetary policy?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 108-123.
    21. Xavier Gabaix, 2020. "A Behavioral New Keynesian Model," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 110(8), pages 2271-2327, August.
    22. David V. Budescu & Eva Chen, 2015. "Identifying Expertise to Extract the Wisdom of Crowds," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(2), pages 267-280, February.
    23. Lily Hua Fang & Sterling Huang, 2017. "Gender and Connections among Wall Street Analysts," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 30(9), pages 3305-3335.
    24. Benchimol, Jonathan & El-Shagi, Makram, 2020. "Forecast performance in times of terrorism," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 386-402.
    25. Camille Cornand & Paul Hubert, 2020. "On the external validity of experimental inflation forecasts: A comparison with five categories of field expectations," Post-Print halshs-02285233, HAL.
    26. Clarke, Jonathan & Subramanian, Ajay, 2006. "Dynamic forecasting behavior by analysts: Theory and evidence," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 80(1), pages 81-113, April.
    27. Campbell, Sean D. & Sharpe, Steven A., 2009. "Anchoring Bias in Consensus Forecasts and Its Effect on Market Prices," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 44(2), pages 369-390, April.
    28. Barbara Rossi & Tatevik Sekhposyan, 2015. "Macroeconomic Uncertainty Indices Based on Nowcast and Forecast Error Distributions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(5), pages 650-655, May.
    29. Ben S. Bernanke, 2007. "Inflation expectations and inflation forecasting," Speech 306, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    30. Keane, Michael P & Runkle, David E, 1990. "Testing the Rationality of Price Forecasts: New Evidence from Panel Data," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(4), pages 714-735, September.
    31. repec:bla:jfinan:v:53:y:1998:i:6:p:1839-1885 is not listed on IDEAS
    32. Bae, Kee-Hong & Stulz, René M. & Tan, Hongping, 2008. "Do local analysts know more? A cross-country study of the performance of local analysts and foreign analysts," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(3), pages 581-606, June.
    33. de Vincent-Humphreys, Rupert & Dimitrova, Ivelina & Falck, Elisabeth & Henkel, Lukas & Meyler, Aidan, 2019. "Twenty years of the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters," Economic Bulletin Articles, European Central Bank, vol. 1.
    34. Scharfstein, David S & Stein, Jeremy C, 1990. "Herd Behavior and Investment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(3), pages 465-479, June.
    35. Roy Batchelor, 2007. "Forecaster Behaviour and Bias in Macroeconomic Forecasts," ifo Working Paper Series 39, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
    36. Lucia Alessi & Eric Ghysels & Luca Onorante & Richard Peach & Simon Potter, 2014. "Central Bank Macroeconomic Forecasting During the Global Financial Crisis: The European Central Bank and Federal Reserve Bank of New York Experiences," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(4), pages 483-500, October.
    37. David Laster & Paul Bennett & In Sun Geoum, 1999. "Rational Bias in Macroeconomic Forecasts," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(1), pages 293-318.
    38. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2015. "Information Rigidity and the Expectations Formation Process: A Simple Framework and New Facts," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(8), pages 2644-2678, August.
    39. Jacob A. Mincer, 1974. "Schooling, Experience, and Earnings," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number minc74-1.
    40. Rachel Adeney & Ivailo Arsov & Richard Evans, 2017. "Inflation Expectations in Advanced Economies," RBA Bulletin (Print copy discontinued), Reserve Bank of Australia, pages 31-44, March.
    41. Capistrán, Carlos & Timmermann, Allan, 2009. "Forecast Combination With Entry and Exit of Experts," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 27(4), pages 428-440.
    42. Genre, Véronique & Kenny, Geoff & Meyler, Aidan & Timmermann, Allan, 2013. "Combining expert forecasts: Can anything beat the simple average?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 108-121.
    43. Barberis, Nicholas & Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert, 1998. "A model of investor sentiment," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(3), pages 307-343, September.
    44. Ulrike Malmendier & Stefan Nagel, 2011. "Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic Experiences Affect Risk Taking?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 126(1), pages 373-416.
    45. Sebastiano Manzan, 2011. "Differential Interpretation in the Survey of Professional Forecasters," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 43(5), pages 993-1017, August.
    46. Marimon, Ramon & Sunder, Shyam, 1993. "Indeterminacy of Equilibria in a Hyperinflationary World: Experimental Evidence," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 61(5), pages 1073-1107, September.
    47. Mikhail, Michael B. & Walther, Beverly R. & Willis, Richard H., 2003. "The effect of experience on security analyst underreaction," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 101-116, April.
    48. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/7t8isspkbs8hk8kol9kk9sjdl6 is not listed on IDEAS
    49. David H. Romer & Christina D. Romer, 2000. "Federal Reserve Information and the Behavior of Interest Rates," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(3), pages 429-457, June.
    50. Terence Lim, 2001. "Rationality and Analysts' Forecast Bias," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(1), pages 369-385, February.
    51. R?diger Bachmann & Steffen Elstner & Eric R. Sims, 2013. "Uncertainty and Economic Activity: Evidence from Business Survey Data," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 5(2), pages 217-249, April.
    52. Alok Kumar, 2010. "Self‐Selection and the Forecasting Abilities of Female Equity Analysts," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(2), pages 393-435, May.
    53. Ulrike Malmendier & Stefan Nagel, 2016. "Learning from Inflation Experiences," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 131(1), pages 53-87.
    54. Harrison Hong & Marcin Kacperczyk, 2010. "Competition and Bias," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 125(4), pages 1683-1725.
    55. Mitchell, Karlyn & Pearce, Douglas K., 2007. "Professional forecasts of interest rates and exchange rates: Evidence from the Wall Street Journal's panel of economists," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 840-854, December.
    56. Raffaella Giacomini & Barbara Rossi, 2010. "Forecast comparisons in unstable environments," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(4), pages 595-620.
    57. Carlos Capistrán & Allan Timmermann, 2009. "Disagreement and Biases in Inflation Expectations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 41(2‐3), pages 365-396, March.
    58. Heckman, James, 2013. "Sample selection bias as a specification error," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 31(3), pages 129-137.
    59. Berger, Helge & Ehrmann, Michael & Fratzscher, Marcel, 2009. "Forecasting ECB monetary policy: Accuracy is a matter of geography," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 53(8), pages 1028-1041, November.
    60. Michael B. Clement & Senyo Y. Tse, 2005. "Financial Analyst Characteristics and Herding Behavior in Forecasting," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 60(1), pages 307-341, February.
    61. Rong Huang & Murugappa (Murgie) Krishnan & John Shon & Ping Zhou, 2017. "Who Herds? Who Doesn't? Estimates of Analysts’ Herding Propensity in Forecasting Earnings," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 34(1), pages 374-399, March.
    62. Veress, Aron & Kaiser, Lars, 2017. "Forecasting quality of professionals: Does affiliation matter?," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 159-168.
    63. Jacob, John & Lys, Thomas Z. & Neale, Margaret A., 1999. "Expertise in forecasting performance of security analysts," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(1), pages 51-82, November.
    64. Harrison Hong & Jeffrey D. Kubik & Amit Solomon, 2000. "Security Analysts' Career Concerns and Herding of Earnings Forecasts," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 31(1), pages 121-144, Spring.
    65. Christopher J. Malloy, 2005. "The Geography of Equity Analysis," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 60(2), pages 719-755, April.
    66. Jacob A. Mincer, 1974. "Schooling and Earnings," NBER Chapters, in: Schooling, Experience, and Earnings, pages 41-63, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    67. repec:fip:fedgsq:y:2007:i:jul10 is not listed on IDEAS
    68. Patton, Andrew J. & Timmermann, Allan, 2010. "Why do forecasters disagree? Lessons from the term structure of cross-sectional dispersion," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(7), pages 803-820, October.
    69. Sebastiano Manzan, 2011. "Differential Interpretation in the Survey of Professional Forecasters," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 43(5), pages 993-1017, August.
    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. Zohar, Osnat, 2024. "Cyclicality of uncertainty and disagreement," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    2. Pedro J. Gutiérrez-Diez & Tibor Pál, 2023. "Monetary policy models: lessons from the Eurozone crisis," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-19, December.
    3. Curti, Filippo & Kazinnik, Sophia, 2023. "Central bank communication and website characteristics," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 212(C), pages 1216-1241.

    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. Conrad, Christian & Lahiri, Kajal, 2023. "Heterogeneous expectations among professional forecasters," ZEW Discussion Papers 23-062, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    2. Chini, Emilio Zanetti, 2023. "Can we estimate macroforecasters’ mis-behavior?," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 149(C).
    3. Clements, Michael P., 2021. "Do survey joiners and leavers differ from regular participants? The US SPF GDP growth and inflation forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 634-646.
    4. Constantin Burgi, 2016. "What Do We Lose When We Average Expectations?," Working Papers 2016-013, The George Washington University, Department of Economics, H. O. Stekler Research Program on Forecasting.
    5. Kryvtsov, Oleksiy & Petersen, Luba, 2021. "Central bank communication that works: Lessons from lab experiments," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 760-780.
    6. Lena Dräger & Michael J. Lamla, 2024. "Consumers' macroeconomic expectations," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(2), pages 427-451, April.
    7. repec:zbw:bofrdp:037 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Tomasz Łyziak & Xuguang Simon Sheng, 2023. "Disagreement in Consumer Inflation Expectations," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 55(8), pages 2215-2241, December.
    9. Zohar, Osnat, 2024. "Cyclicality of uncertainty and disagreement," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    10. Ramnath, Sundaresh & Rock, Steve & Shane, Philip, 2008. "The financial analyst forecasting literature: A taxonomy with suggestions for further research," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 24(1), pages 34-75.
    11. Ambrocio, Gene, 2017. "The real effects of overconfidence and fundamental uncertainty shocks," Research Discussion Papers 37/2017, Bank of Finland.
    12. Andrade, Philippe & Gautier, Erwan & Mengus, Eric, 2023. "What matters in households’ inflation expectations?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 50-68.
    13. Marinovic, Iván & Ottaviani, Marco & Sorensen, Peter, 2013. "Forecasters’ Objectives and Strategies," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 690-720, Elsevier.
    14. Goldfayn-Frank, Olga & Wohlfart, Johannes, 2020. "Expectation formation in a new environment: Evidence from the German reunification," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 301-320.
    15. repec:zbw:bofrdp:2017_037 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Daniel Bradley & Sinan Gokkaya & Xi Liu, 2020. "Ties That Bind: The Value of Professional Connections to Sell-Side Analysts," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(9), pages 4118-4151, September.
    17. Bizer, Kilian & Meub, Lukas & Proeger, Till & Spiwoks, Markus, 2014. "Strategic coordination in forecasting: An experimental study," University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics 195, University of Goettingen, Department of Economics.
    18. Bao, Te & Hommes, Cars & Pei, Jiaoying, 2021. "Expectation formation in finance and macroeconomics: A review of new experimental evidence," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(C).
    19. Michael P. Clements, 2022. "Forecaster Efficiency, Accuracy, and Disagreement: Evidence Using Individual‐Level Survey Data," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 54(2-3), pages 537-568, March.
    20. Tsuchiya, Yoichi, 2023. "Assessing the World Bank’s growth forecasts," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 64-84.
    21. Gaurav Kumar Singh & Tathagata Bandyopadhyay, 2024. "Determinants of disagreement: Learning from inflation expectations survey of households," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(2), pages 326-343, March.
    22. Wagner Piazza Gaglianone & João Victor Issler, 2014. "Microfounded Forecasting," Working Papers Series 372, Central Bank of Brazil, Research Department.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    expert forecast; behavioral economics; survival analysis; panel estimation; global financial crisis;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods
    • E37 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications
    • E70 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - General

    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:boi:wpaper:2020.11. 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: Yossi Yakhin (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/boigvil.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.