Estimating Fundamental Cross-Section Dispersion from Fixed Event Forecasts

Jonas Dovern and Ulrich Fritsche

No 787, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: A couple of recent papers have shifted the focus towards disagreement of professional forecasters. When dealing with survey data that is sampled at a frequency higher than annual and that includes only fixed event forecasts, e.g. expectation of average annual growth rates measures of disagreement across forecasters naturally are distorted by a component that mainly reflects the time varying forecast horizon. We use data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters, which reports both fixed event and fixed horizon forecasts, to evaluate different methods for extracting the "fundamental" component of disagreement. Based on the paper's results we suggest two methods to estimate dispersion measures from panels of fixed event forecasts: a moving average transformation of the underlying forecasts and estimation with constant forecast-horizon- effects. Both models are easy to handle and deliver equally well performing results, which show a surprisingly high correlation (up to 0:94) with the true dispersion.

Keywords: Survey data; dispersion; disagreement; fixed event forecasts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 C32 E37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 p.
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm and nep-for
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Estimating fundamental cross-section dispersion from fixed event forecasts (2008)
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