During the ongoing financial crisis the analysis of similar historical crises has gained more and more attention among economic researchers and forecasters. Existing studies, however, do not tackle the immense heterogeneity that is present in cross-country samples in a formal and consistent way....

Using real-time data, we analyze how the systematic expectation errors of professional forecasters in 19 advanced economies depend on the state of the business cycle. Our results indicate that the general result that forecasters systematically overestimate output growth (across all countries)...

During the ongoing financial crisis the analysis of similar historical crises has gained more and more attention among economic researchers and forecasters. Existing studies, however, do not tackle the immense heterogeneity that is present in cross-country samples in a formal and consistent way....

We examine the behavior of forecasts for real GDP growth using a large panel of individual forecasts from 30 advanced and emerging economies during 1989–2010. Our main findings are as follows. First, our evidence does not support the validity of the sticky information model (Mankiw and Reis,...

Recently, much attention has been devoted to the measurement of macroeconomic (expectation) uncertainty and its impact on aggregate economic fuctuations. This paper presents a new qualitative measure of macroeconomic expectation uncertainty based on data from a German online survey of consumer...

This paper documents multivariate forecast disagreement among professional forecasters of the Euro area economy and discusses implications for models of heterogeneous expectation formation. Disagreement varies over time and is strongly counter-cyclical. Disagreement is positively correlated with...