We establish several stylized facts about the behavior of individual uncertainty and disagreement between individuals when forecasting inflation in the laboratory. Subjects correctly perceive the underlying inflation uncertainty in only 60% of cases, which can be interpreted as the...

Abstract: This paper compares the behavior of subjects' uncertainty in different monetary policy environments when forecasting inflation in the laboratory. We find that inflation targeting produces lower uncertainty and higher accuracy of interval forecasts than inflation forecast targeting. We...

Historical time-series data is short relative to the frequency of political and economic crises. This makes it difficult to use pure time-series methods to identify the impacts of safe haven demand on asset prices, in the face of confounding effects from a wide range of alternative drivers. We...

We study the impact of diverse beliefs on conduct of monetary policy. We use a New Keynesian Model solved with a quadratic approximation. Aggregation renders the belief distribution an aggregate state variable. Diverse expectations change standard results about a smooth trade-off between...

Most macroeconomic data is continuously revised as additional information becomes available. We suggest that revisions of data is an important source of uncertainty about the state of the economy. This paper evaluates the quality of major real macroeconomic Euro area variables, published by...

This article develops a simple theoretical framework to show how forecasters may bias downward point predictions under the assumption that the asymmetric loss function is directly related to the (Mean) Absolute Percentage Error (M)APE.

The likelihood of success of grantmaking on large scale projects depends in general on pieces of information widely dispersed and privately held by recipients, public agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other interested parties. In this paper we discuss how philanthropists could...

Budget policymakers should focus on expected revenue growth (average growth over history) and on the risk or volatility around that average. It makes sense to think about this risk as having two components purely random risk unrelated to the economy and risk associated with an economy that is...

Accurately predicting revenue growth is nearly impossible. Predicting the peaks and valleys of the business cycle is even more hopeless. This matters because tax revenues are largely driven by economic growth. Volatile, unpredictable revenue growth causes all sorts of unpleasant responses on the...

This paper provides evidence on the existence of asymmetries in the underlying loss preferences for the difference between the spot and forward nominal exchange rate. We find that, in the context of both linear and non-linear loss functions, the underlying loss preferences for monthly data are...