We provide key insights on expectation formation based on the Bloomberg economic survey: around two thirds of professional forecasters provide GDP forecasts that are temporally consistent, meaning that quarterly forecasts add up to the annual. Temporally consistent forecasts are not more...

Survey forecasts are prone to entry and exit of forecasters as well as forecasters not contributing every period leading to gaps. These gaps make it difficult to compare individual forecasters to each other and raises the question of how to deal with the missing observations. This is addressed...

The Google Insights data are a collection of recorded Internet searches for a huge number of the keywords, which are available since January 2004. These searches represent a kind of revealed perceptions of Internet users, which are a (possibly not entirely representative) sample of the general...

We examine how people's forecasts for oil or gasoline prices influence their forecasts for broader inflation. We find little evidence from two US household surveys that people over-react to their beliefs about gasoline prices when formulating their forecasts about inflation, with much of the...

No, not according to our data. Using a unique data set, we run panel regressions to test whether professional forecasters believe in uncovered interest rate parity (UIP). Specifically, we test whether the interest rate expectations for individual forecasters are in line with their exchange rate...

We evaluate the drivers of online interactions and the importance of these interactions for international trade patterns. To this end, we measure the volume of online interactions between countries using a unique individual level data set with over 25 million multiplayer games played between...

We estimate Okun's law, the negative relationship between output and the unemployment rate, at the sector level for the US, the UK, Japan, and Switzerland to test several hypotheses that may explain why the aggregate Okun's coeffcients are different across countries. Specifically, we show that...

This paper introduces a new test of the predictive performance and market timing for categorical forecasts based on contingency tables when the user has non-categorical loss functions. For example, a user might be interested in the return of an underlying variable instead of just the direction....

This study documents how the demographics of new infections and mortality changed over time across US counties. We find that counties with a larger population share aged above 60 were hit harder initially in terms of both cases and mortality in March and April while counties with a larger...