Recent price trends in housing markets may reflect herding of market participants. A natural question is whether such herding, to the extent that it occurred, reflects herding in forecasts of professional forecasters. Using survey data for Canada, Japan, and the United States, we did not find...

We revisit the sources of the bias in Federal Reserve forecasts and assess whether a precautionary motive can explain the forecast bias. In contrast to the existing literature, we use forecasts submitted by individual FOMC members to uncover members' implicit loss function. Our key finding is...

We analyze more than 20,000 forecasts of nine metal prices at four different forecast horizons. We document that forecasts are heterogeneous and report that anti-herding appears to be a source of this heterogeneity. Forecaster anti-herding reflects strategic interactions among forecasters that...

Using survey forecasts of a large number of Asian, European, and South American emerging market exchange rates, we studied empirically whether evidence of herding or antiherding behavior of exchange-rate forecasters can be detected in the cross-section of forecasts. Emerging market exchange-rate...

Based on the approach advanced by Elliott et al. (Rev. Ec. Studies. 72, 1197..1125, 2005), we analyzed whether the loss function of a sample of exchange rate forecasters is asymmetric in the forecast error. Using forecasts of the euro/dollar exchange rate, we found that the shape of the loss...

Using forecasts of the Brazilian real and the Mexican peso, we analyze the shape of the loss function of exchange-rate forecasters and the rationality of their forecasts. We find a substantial degree of cross-sectional heterogeneity with respect to the shape of the loss function. While some...

We study the loss function of 15 European governments as implied by their budget balance forecasts. Results suggest that the shape of the loss function varies across countries. The loss function becomes more asymmetric as the forecast horizon increases and in advance of parliamentary election....