This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

This paper examines point and density forecasts of real GDP growth, inflation and unemployment from the European Central Bank’s Survey of Professional Forecasters. We present individual uncertainty measures and introduce individual point- and density-based measures of disagreement. The...

Forecasts are useless whenever the forecast error variance fails to be smaller than the unconditional variance of the target variable. This paper develops tests for the null hypothesis that forecasts become uninformative beyond some limiting forecast horizon h. Following Diebold and Mariano (DM,...

Predictions about the future are commonly evaluated through statistical tests. As shown by recent literature, many known tests are subject to adverse selection problems and cannot discriminate between forecasters who are competent and forecasters who are uninformed but predict strategically. We...

We propose an alternative Ratio Statistic for measuring predictability of stock prices. Our statistic is based on actual returns rather than logarithmic returns and is therefore better suited to capturing price predictability. It captures not only linear dependence in the same way as the...

Tests for relative predictive accuracy have become a widespread addendum to forecast comparisons. Many empirical research reports conclude that the difference between the entertained forecasting models is 'insignificant'. This paper collects arguments that cast doubt on the usefulness of...

This paper examines the asymptotic and finite-sample properties of tests of equal forecast accuracy when the models being compared are overlapping in the sense of Vuong (1989). Two models are overlapping when the true model contains just a subset of variables common to the larger sets of...

We examine the asymptotic and finite-sample properties of tests for equal forecast accuracy and encompassing applied to 1-step ahead forecasts from nested parametric models. We first derive the asymptotic distributions of two standard tests and one new test of encompassing. Tables of...

This paper introduces the model confidence set (MCS) and applies it to the selection of models. An MCS is a set of models that is constructed so that it will contain the best model with a given level of confidence. The MCS is in this sense analogous to a confidence interval for a parameter. The...