A large set of financial variables has only limited power to predict a latent factor common to the year-ahead forecast errors for real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, the unemployment rate, and Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation for three sets of professional forecasters: the Federal...

The paper analyses reasons for departures from strong rationality of growth and inflation forecasts based on annual observations from 1963 to 2004. We rely on forecasts from the joint forecast of the so-called "six leading" forecasting institutions in Germany and argue that violations of the...

This paper constructs internationally consistent measures of macroeconomic uncertainty. Our econometric framework extracts uncertainty from revisions in data obtained from standardized national accounts. Applying our model to quarterly post-WWII real-time data, we estimate macroeconomic...