We revisit the sources of the bias in Federal Reserve forecasts and assess whether a precautionary motive can explain the forecast bias. In contrast to the existing literature, we use forecasts submitted by individual FOMC members to uncover members' implicit loss function. Our key finding is...

This research applies data from the Livingston survey to study the time variation in the sentiment of U.S. stock-market forecasters. A Panel Smooth Transition Regression (STR) model is estimated to identify the importance of market conditions summarized by stock-market misalignments and recent...

Prognosen von Metallpreisen: Asymmetrische Verlustfunktionen und Rationalität Metalle sind ein wichtiger industrieller Roh- und Werkstoff. Aufgrund der sehr starken Schwankungen der Metallpreise stehen Prognosen der zukünftigen Preisentwicklung häufig im Fokus medialer Berichterstattung. In...

The U.S. subprime mortgage crisis has witnessed that house prices may have a profound effect on the economy. A key question for researchers and policymakers is what can be learnt from forecasts of changes in house prices. We use survey data from the WSJ forecast poll to analyze this question....

We study whether forecasts of the rate of change of the price of oil are rational. To this end, we consider a model that allows the shape of forecasters' loss function to be studied. The shape of forecasters' loss function may be consistent with a symmetric or an asymmetric loss function. We...

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....

Using survey forecasts of a large number of Asian, European, and South American emerging market exchange rates, we studied empirically whether evidence of herding or antiherding behavior of exchange-rate forecasters can be detected in the cross-section of forecasts. Emerging market exchange-rate...

We analyze more than 20,000 forecasts of nine metal prices at four different forecast horizons. We document that forecasts are heterogeneous and report that anti-herding appears to be a source of this heterogeneity. Forecaster anti-herding reflects strategic interactions among forecasters that...

Based on the approach advanced by Elliott et al. (Rev. Ec. Studies. 72, 1197-1125), 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...