In this paper, we explore the potential gains from alternative combinations of the surveyed forecasts in the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters. Our analysis encompasses a variety of methods including statistical combinations based on principal components analysis and trimmed means,...

This paper investigates how expectations about future government spending affect the transmission of fiscal policy shocks. We study the effects of two different types of government spending shocks in the United States: (i) spending shocks that are accompanied by an expected reversal of public...

In this paper, we propose a framework to evaluate the subjective density forecasts of macroeconomists using micro data from the euro area Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). A key aspect of our analysis is the evaluation of the entire predictive densities, including an evaluation of the...

This paper investigates how expectations about future government spending affect the transmission of fiscal policy shocks. We study the effects of two different types of government spending shocks in the United States: (i) spending shocks that are accompanied by an expected reversal of public...

In this paper, we propose a framework to evaluate the information content of subjective expert density forecasts using micro data from the ECB's Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). A key aspect of our analysis is the use of scoring functions which evaluate the entire predictive densities,...

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...

This paper explores how changes in macroeconomic uncertainty have affected the decision to reply to the European Central Bank's Survey of Professional Forecasters (ECB's SPF). The results suggest that higher (lower) aggregate uncertainty increases (reduces) non-response to the survey. This...

This paper uses forecasts from the European Central Bank’s Survey of Professional Forecasters to investigate the relationship between inflation and inflation expectations in the euro area. We use theoretical structures based on the New Keynesian and Neoclassical Phillips curves to inform our...

We propose methods to evaluate the risk assessments collected as part of the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). Our approach focuses on direction-of-change predictions as well as the prediction of relatively more extreme macroeconomic outcomes located in the upper and lower regions of...

In this paper, we exploit micro data from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) to examine the link between the characteristics of macroeconomic density forecasts (such as their location, spread, skewness and tail risk) and density forecast performance. Controlling for the effects of...