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...

Carlson and Parkin [Economica 42 (1975) 123] quantify qualitative survey data on expectations assuming aggregate expectations are normally distributed. Using UK survey data, we find normal distributions provide as accurate expectations of inflation and output growth as any permitted non-normal...

Increasingly, professional forecasters and academic researchers present model-based and subjective or judgment-based forecasts in economics which are accompanied by some measure of uncertainty. In its most complete form this measure is a probability density function for future values of the...

First and higher order digits in data sets of natural and socio-economic processes often follow a distribution called Benford's law. This phenomenon has been used in many business and scientific applications, especially in fraud detection for financial data. In this paper, we analyse whether...

Das ifo Instiut hat ein neues Handbuch der umfragebasierten Konjunkturforschung erstellt. Das Handbuch gibt einen Überblick über die regelmäßigen Befragungsaktivitäten des Instituts und zeigt Möglichkeiten der wissenschaftlichen Verwertung der Befragungsergebnisse im Rahmen der...

The paper studies probability forecasts of inflation and GDP by monetary authorities. Such forecasts can contribute to central bank transparency and reputation building. Problems with principal and agent make the usual argument for using scoring rules to motivate probability forecasts confused;...

In this paper I argue that the current core of macroeconomics - by which I mainly mean the so-called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium approach - has become so mesmerized with its own internal logic that it has begun to confuse the precision it has achieved about its own world with the...

In an attempt to predict a peak in the U.S. economy using a classical statistical decision methodology and a Bayesian methodology and using the 1996 revised composite leading economic indicators, it is learned that the Bayesian models have generally outperformed the classical statistical ones...

On November 26, 2001, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the U.S. economy had officially entered into a recession in March 2001. This decision was a surprise and did not end all the conflicting opinions expressed by economists. This matter was finally settled in July 2002...

Since the late 1970s/early 1980s, the entire U.S. economy has gone through some structural changes. Outside of the technological changes, the Federal Reserve monetary policies have probably been the main force behind these changes. These policies, known as soft-landing policies, focused on a...