We study the loss function of 15 European governments as implied by their budget balance forecasts. Results suggest that the shape of the loss function varies across countries. The loss function becomes more asymmetric as the forecast horizon increases and in advance of parliamentary election....

We derive internal consistency restrictions on short-, medium- and long-term oil price forecasts. We then analyse whether oil price forecasts extracted from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) conducted by the European Central Bank (ECB) satisfy these internal consistency restrictions....

We use oil price forecasts from the Consensus Economic Forecast poll for the time period Oct. 1989 – Dec. 2008 to analyze how forecasters form their expectations. Our findings indicate that the extrapolative as well as the regressive expectation formation hypothesis play a role. Standard...

We use the foreign exchange forecasts of the Wall Street Journal poll to analyze forecasters' expectation formation process for the yen against the US dollar for the period 1989-2007. We also contrast the expectation formation process with the actual exchange rate process. We find that most...

Survey data of forecasts of the housing market may provide a particularly rich data nvironment for researchers and policymakers to study developments in housing markets. Based on the approach advanced by Elliott et al. (Rev. Ec. Studies. 72, 1197-1125, 2005), we studied the properties of a large...