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Economic and financial forecasts are important for business planning and government policy but are notoriously challenging. We take advantage of recent advances in individual and group judgement, and a data set of economic and financial forecasts compiled over 25 years, consisting of multiple individual and institutional estimates, to test the claim that nominal groups will make more accurate economic and financial forecast than individuals. We validate the forecasts using the subsequent published (real) outcomes, explore the performance of nominal groups against institutions, identify potential superforecasters and discuss the benefits of implementing structured judgment techniques to improve economic and financial forecasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We apply a soft computing method to generate country-specific economic sentiment indicators that provide estimates of year-on-year GDP growth rates for 19 European economies. First, genetic programming is used to evolve business and consumer economic expectations to derive sentiment indicators for each country. To assess the performance of the proposed indicators, we first design a nowcasting experiment in which we recursively generate estimates of GDP at the end of each quarter, using the latest business and consumer survey data available. Second, we design a forecasting exercise in which we iteratively re-compute the sentiment indicators in each out-of-sample period. When evaluating the accuracy of the predictions obtained for different forecast horizons, we find that the evolved sentiment indicators outperform the time-series models used as a benchmark. These results show the potential of the proposed approach for prediction purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Survey of Primary Dealers (SPD) of the New York Federal Reserve. It states that the survey is produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before the meeting of the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). It mentions that the SPD focuses on expectations for monetary policy and economic outlook including inflation and gross domestic product (GDP).

The article discusses economic forecasting with commentary on the paper "Models of Inflation Expectations Formation: A Comparison of Household and Economist Forecasts" by Edward M. Gramlich. Gramlich portrays two survey measures of inflation expectations as biased and inefficient but the author claims that the results he came to were a product of a misspecified model. He corrects the error and finds that the Michigan survey of household inflation expectations actually passes the standard testing for unbiasedness and inefficiency.

This article presents estimates of ex ante real rates of interest in the European Economic Community (EEC) countries and in the United States from 1973 to 1982. The author notes that estimating real ex ante interest rates is important because of the implications they have on economic policy and analysis; however, these estimations are often difficult to conduct due to problems associated with the observation of inflation. The author presents a model designed to calculate these estimations and discusses the methodology used in its creation. The author specifically addresses how inflationary expectations were accounted for.

The article focuses on empirical methodologies of expected inflation in macroeconomic relations, particularly contrasting survey and rational data sets. An alternative procedure for evaluating the Livingston survey of professional economists is discussed, generating an expectations series which incorporates the rational expectations hypothesis criteria. The series is then compared with the data of the Livingston survey and evaluated concerning forecast errors and nominal interest rate shift explanations.

This paper introduces a new method to measure the unexpected component of dividend announcements. While measures used previously were based on various arbitrary models of dividend expectations, our suggested method compares the reaction of stock and option prices to dividend announcements. Our measure is compared to commonly used model-based measures, to a Box-Jenkins time-series- based measure, and to a Value-Line Investor Survey-based measure of dividend surprises. The new measure is more highly correlated with the market's reaction to the announcements than are alternative measures of dividend surprises. The new measure is also shown to be insensitive to the extent to which the options used to identify unexpected dividend announcements are in- or out-of-the-money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the results of a survey of marketing professionals conducted in late spring of 1980, on their expectations for the near future. A majority believed they would face high inflation throughout the 1980s and rejected the idea of wage or price controls. A trend away from customization of products and conspicuous consumption was expected, yet an increasing demand for high-quality, premium branded products was also predicted. Most assumed that credit would be tightened and successful products would become less common, while the importance of advertising would rise.

The understanding of house price expectations formation is quite limited in the housing literature. This is the first article to rigorously test the rationality of expectations of house price change using survey data. Using a panel data set of the Wall Street Journal economic forecasting survey from 2007 through 2012, I test for unbiasedness and efficiency by implementing the econometric methodology proposed in Davies and Lahiri (1995) in the setting of a three-dimensional panel data set. I find that, after controlling for aggregate shocks, nine of the 47 forecasters have statistically significant biases, and their biases are all negative, indicating that they persistently predict too high of a change in house prices. The hypothesis of efficiency cannot be rejected, suggesting lack of evidence for inefficient use of information. When the year 2012 is excluded, the unbiasedness test shows that 25 of the 47 forecasters systematically overpredicted house price changes. Again, the hypothesis of efficiency cannot be rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]