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 derive a money demand function from a dynamic macroeconomic general equilibrium model to analyze the correlations between professional economists' forecasts of the growth rate of money supply, the inflation rate, the growth rate of real output, and the nominal interest rate. Upon estimating...

Survey data of forecasts of the housing market may provide a particularly rich data environment for researchers and policymakers to study developments in housing markets. Based on the approach advanced by Elliott <italic>et al</italic>. (2005), we studied the properties of a large set of survey data of housing...

Based on the approach developed by Elliott <italic>et al</italic>. (2005), we found that the loss function of a sample of oil price forecasters is asymmetric in the forecast error. Our findings indicate that the loss oil price forecasters incurred when their forecasts exceeded the price of oil tended to be...

We use the term structure of forecasts of housing starts to test for rationality of forecasts. Our test is based on the idea that short-term and long-term forecasts should be internally consistent. We test the internal consistency of forecasts using data for Australia, Canada, Japan and the...

We used the yen/dollar exchange-rate forecasts of the <italic>Wall Street Journal</italic> (WSJ) poll to analyse whether exchange-rate forecasters have an asymmetric loss function. To this end, we applied an approach recently developed by Elliott <italic>et al</italic>. (2005). We found that only few forecasters seem to form...

We use a nonparametric market-timing test to study the <italic>directional accuracy</italic> of survey forecasts of the prices of gold and silver. We find that forecasters have market-timing ability with respect to the direction of change of the price of silver at various forecast horizons. In contrast,...

Metals are important industrial raw and basic materials. Owing to the extremely strong fluctuations of metal prices, forecasts of future price developments are often in the focus of reporting by the media. This article analyses forecasts of six different metal prices, where the discussion...

We analyze whether exchange-rate forecasters herd. To this end, we lay out two widely studied theoretical models of forecaster herding. The models illustrate why forecasters may herd. We then empirically analyze whether forecasts of the Yen/ Dollar, Swiss franc/Dollar, German mark/Dollar, and...

Recent price trends in housing markets may reflect herding of market participants. A natural question is whether such herding, to the extent that it occurred, reflects herding in forecasts of professional forecasters. Using survey data for Canada, Japan, and the United States, we did not find...