We consider the problem of optimally combining individual forecasts of gross domestic product (GDP) and inflation from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) dataset for the Euro Area. Contrary to the common practice of using equal combination weights, we compute optimal weights which...

Abel (2002) shows that pessimism and doubt in the subjective distribution of the growth rate of consumption reduce the risk-free rate puzzle and the equity premium puzzle. We quantify the amount of pessimism and doubt in survey data on US consumption and income. Individual forecasters are, in...

Survey and option data are used to take a new look at the equity premium puzzle. Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data (CBOE's VIX) indicates that investors overestimate the volatility of equity...

We identify government spending news and surprise shocks using a novel identification based on the Survey of Professional Forecasters. News shocks lead to an increase of the interest rate, a real appreciation of US dollar and a worsening of the trade balance. The opposite is found for the...

We assess the perception of professional forecasters regarding the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy measures undertaken by the U.S. Federal Reserve after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Using individual survey data, we analyse the changes in forecasting of bond yields around the...

Survey data on household expectations of inflation are routinely used in economic analysis, yet it is not clear to what extent households are able to articulate their expectations in survey interviews. We propose an alternative approach to recovering households' implicit expectations of...

Nominal and real U.S. interest rates (1997Q1-2008Q2) are combined with inflation expectations from the Survey of Professional Forecasters to calculate time series of risk premia. It is shown that survey data on inflation and output growth uncertainty, as well as a proxy for liquidity premia can...

We study the inflation uncertainty reported by individual forecasters in the Survey of Professional Forecasters 1969-1999. Three popular methods of estimating uncertainty from survey data are analysed in the context of models for forecasting and asset pricing. We find that inflation uncertainty...

We document the empirical properties of revisions to major macroeconomic variables in the United States. Our findings suggest that they do not satisfy simple desirable statistical properties. In particular, we find that these revisions do not have a zero mean, which indicates that the initial...

We investigate the interdependence of fiscal policies, and in particular deficits, in the European Union using an empirical analysis based on real-time fiscal data. There are many potential reasons why fiscal policies could be interdependent, such as direct externalities due to cross-border...