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 aims at evaluating individual expectation accuracy of professional forecasters for 57 U.S., European, and German macroeconomic indicators over the period 1999-2010. The empirical analysis shows that initial announcements are partly considerably revised, and that some revisions occur...

The growth-at-risk (GaR) framework links current macrofinancial conditions to the distribution of future growth. Its main strength is its ability to assess the entire distribution of future GDP growth (in contrast to point forecasts), quantify macrofinancial risks in terms of growth, and monitor...

This chapter demonstrates the usefulness of the GVAR modelling framework as a tool for scenario-based forecasting and counterfactual analysis. Working with the GVAR model developed by Greenwood-Nimmo, Nguyen and Shin (2010, J. Appl. Econometrics), we first show how probabilistic forecasting can...

By matching a large database of individual forecaster data with the universe of sizable natural disasters across 54 countries, we identify a set of new stylized facts: (i) forecasters are persistently heterogeneous in how often they issue or revise a forecast; (ii) information rigidity declines...

This article proposes a way of introducing some organization and tractability in climate science, generating more widely credible evaluations of climate science, and imposing some discipline on the processing and interpretation of climate information. I propose a two-part policy instrument...

The Competitive Industrial Performance index (developed by experts of the UNIDO) is designed as a measure of national competitiveness. Index is an aggregate of eight observable variables, representing different dimensions of competitive industrial performance. Instead of using a cardinal...

The World Economic Outlook (WEO) is a key source of forecasts of global economic conditions. It is therefore important to review the performance of these forecasts against both actual outcomes and alternative forecasts. This paper conducts a series of statistical tests to evaluate the quality of...