Although Australian political pundits frequently make predictions about the future, little systematic evidence exists on the accuracy of these predictions. To assess the predictive power of experts, we survey the transcripts of two well-known political programs - Insiders and Meet the Press -...

This paper derives new theoretical results for forecasting with Global VAR (GVAR) models. It is shown that the presence of a strong unobserved common factor can lead to an undeter-mined GVAR model. To solve this problem, we propose augmenting the GVAR with additional proxy equations for the...

We have argued that from the standpoint of a policy maker, the uncertainty of using the average forecast is not the variance of the average, but rather the average of the variances of the individual forecasts that incorporate idiosyncratic risks. With a slight reformulation of the loss function...

This paper explores a range of different forecast methods for Brent oil prices and analyses their performance relative to oil futures and the random walk over the period 1995Q1 - 2015Q2, including periods of stable, upwardly trending and rapidly dropping oil prices. None of the individual...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic projections of the German government since the 1970s and compares it those of the Joint Economic Forecast, which is an in-dependent forecasting institution in Germany. Our results indicate that nominal GDP projections are upward biased for longer...

Using a novel dataset that contains qualitative firm survey data on sales forecasts as well as balance-sheet data on realized sales, we document that only major forecast errors are predictable and display autocorrelation. This result is a particular violation of the Full Information Rational...

We have argued that from the standpoint of a policy maker who has access to a number of expert forecasts, the uncertainty of a combined forecast should be interpreted as that of a typical forecaster randomly drawn from the pool. With a standard factor decomposition of a panel of forecasts, we...

We reformulate the Nordhaus test as a friction model where the large number of zero revisions are treated as censored, i.e., unknown values inside a small region of "imperceptibility." Using Blue Chip individual forecasts of U.S. real GDP growth, inflation, and unemployment over 1985-2020, we...

This paper evaluates the predictive content of a set of alternative monthly indicators of global economic activity for nowcasting and forecasting quarterly world GDP using mixed-frequency models. We find that a recently proposed indicator that covers multiple dimensions of the global economy...