IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/usg/dp2005/2005-13.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

On the Rationality of the General Public

Author

Listed:
  • GEBHARD KIRCHGÄSSNER

Abstract

Using Allensbach survey data about how people look forward to the coming year, we construct true ex post-forecasts and compare them with the forecasts produced by the German Council of Economic Experts and by the Economic Research Institutes. Then, we perform rationality tests for these forecast series. The Allensbach forecasts outperform the professional forecasts in many respects. Finally, we ask whether information included in short-term interest rates is reflected in the different forecasts. We show that the Allensbach forecasts seem to fully take into account this information, while the professional forecasts do not. Thus, when making expectations, the German general public seems to consider more information than the professional forecasters.

Suggested Citation

  • Gebhard Kirchgässner, 2005. "On the Rationality of the General Public," University of St. Gallen Department of Economics working paper series 2005 2005-13, Department of Economics, University of St. Gallen.
    • Handle: RePEc:usg:dp2005:2005-13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://ux-tauri.unisg.ch/RePEc/usg/dp2005/DP-13_Ki.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. Gebhardt Kirschgässner & Marcel Savioz, 2001. "Monetary Policy and Forecasts for Real GDP Growth: An Empirical Investigation for the Federal Republic of Germany," German Economic Review, Verein für Socialpolitik, vol. 2(4), pages 339-365, November.
    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. Birger Antholz, 2006. "Geschichte der quantitativen Konjunkturprognose-Evaluation in Deutschland," Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung / Quarterly Journal of Economic Research, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research, vol. 75(2), pages 12-33.

    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. Behrens, Christoph, 2019. "Evaluating the Joint Efficiency of German Trade Forecasts. A nonparametric multivariate approach," Working Papers 9, German Research Foundation's Priority Programme 1859 "Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour", Humboldt University Berlin.
    2. Breuer Christian, 2015. "On the Rationality of Medium-Term Tax Revenue Forecasts: Evidence from Germany," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 235(1), pages 22-40, February.
    3. Ulrich Fritsche & Artur Tarassow, 2017. "Vergleichende Evaluation der Konjunkturprognosen des Instituts für Makroökonomie und Konjunkturforschung an der Hans-Böckler-Stiftung für den Zeitraum 2005-2014," IMK Studies 54-2017, IMK at the Hans Boeckler Foundation, Macroeconomic Policy Institute.
    4. Hendry, David F. & Clements, Michael P., 2003. "Economic forecasting: some lessons from recent research," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 20(2), pages 301-329, March.
    5. Graham Elliott & Ivana Komunjer & Allan Timmermann, 2008. "Biases in Macroeconomic Forecasts: Irrationality or Asymmetric Loss?," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(1), pages 122-157, March.
    6. Jan Jacobs & Jan-Egbert Sturm, 2009. "The information content of KOF indicators on Swiss current account data revisions," OECD Journal: Journal of Business Cycle Measurement and Analysis, OECD Publishing, Centre for International Research on Economic Tendency Surveys, vol. 2008(2), pages 161-181.
    7. Christina Ziegler, 2009. "Testing Predicitive Ability of Business Cycle Indicators for the Euro Area," ifo Working Paper Series 69, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
    8. repec:kap:iaecre:v:14:y:2008:i:1:p:112-124 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Ericsson, Neil R., 2016. "Eliciting GDP forecasts from the FOMC’s minutes around the financial crisis," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 571-583.
    10. Pascal Bührig & Klaus Wohlrabe, 2015. "Revisions of German Industrial Production Statistics and Ifo Indicators," ifo Schnelldienst, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 68(21), pages 27-31, November.
    11. Baris Soybilgen & Ege Yazgan, 2017. "An evaluation of inflation expectations in Turkey," Central Bank Review, Research and Monetary Policy Department, Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, vol. 17(1), pages 1-31–38.
    12. Barbara Rossi, 2013. "Exchange Rate Predictability," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 51(4), pages 1063-1119, December.
    13. Pericoli, Marcello & Taboga, Marco, 2012. "Bond risk premia, macroeconomic fundamentals and the exchange rate," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 42-65.
    14. Chang, Andrew C. & Hanson, Tyler J., 2016. "The accuracy of forecasts prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 23-43.
    15. Sucarrat, Genaro, 2009. "Forecast Evaluation of Explanatory Models of Financial Variability," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 3, pages 1-33.
    16. repec:zbw:rwidps:0051 is not listed on IDEAS
    17. Michael P. Clements, 2014. "US Inflation Expectations and Heterogeneous Loss Functions, 1968–2010," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(1), pages 1-14, January.
    18. 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.
    19. Isiklar, Gultekin, 2005. "On aggregation bias in fixed-event forecast efficiency tests," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 89(3), pages 312-316, December.
    20. Christopher Hansman & Harrison Hong & Áureo de Paula & Vishal Singh, 2020. "A Sticky-Price View of Hoarding," NBER Working Papers 27051, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    21. Torben G. ANDERSEN & Tim BOLLERSLEV & Nour MEDDAHI, 2002. "Correcting The Errors : A Note On Volatility Forecast Evaluation Based On High-Frequency Data And Realized Volatilities," Cahiers de recherche 21-2002, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ.
    22. Caporin, Massimiliano & McAleer, Michael, 2014. "Robust ranking of multivariate GARCH models by problem dimension," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 172-185.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods

    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:usg:dp2005:2005-13. 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: Joerg Baumberger (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vwasgch.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.