A couple of recent papers have shifted the focus towards disagreement of professional forecasters. When dealing with survey data that is sampled at a frequency higher than annual and that includes only fixed event forecasts, e.g. expectation of average annual growth rates measures of...

Based on annual data for growth and inflation forecasts for Germany covering the time span from 1970 to 2007 and up to 17 different forecasts per year, we test for a possible asymmetry of the forecasters' loss function and estimate the degree of asymmetry for each forecasting institution using...

We use a machine-learning approach known as Boosted Regression Trees (BRT) to reexamine the usefulness of selected leading indicators for predicting recessions. We estimate the BRT approach on German data and study the relative importance of the indicators and their marginal effects on the...

Most macroeconomic data is continuously revised as additional information becomes available. We suggest that revisions of data is an increasingly important source of uncertainty about the state of the economy and offer an alternative channel of uncertainty - data uncertainty. This paper adds on...

Based on annual data for growth and inflation forecasts for Germany covering the time span from 1970 to 2007 and up to 17 different forecasts per year, we test for a possible asymmetry of the forecasters' loss function and estimate the degree of asymmetry for each forecasting institution using...