Since Fama's Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), numerous authors have argued that it is impossible to constantly beat the market. The best an investor can do is buy and hold 'the market' through a market index. Taking into account the important role of market indices as benchmarks against which...

Since the early days of Dow Jones Averages indexing has raised complexity. The lack of standard theoretical framework for index building, and the heterogeneity of empirical studies regarding their statistical properties, make comparisons an issue. The scenario remains the same in...

Business and consumer surveys are the main source of agents' expectations. In this study we use survey expectations about a wide range of economic variables to forecast GDP growth. We propose an empirical approach to derive mathematical functional forms that link survey-based expectations to...

In this study we use agents' expectations about the state of the economy to generate indicators of economic activity in twenty-six European countries grouped in five regions (Western, Eastern, and Southern Europe, and Baltic and Scandinavian countries). We apply a data-driven procedure based on...

The main objective of this study is to present a two-step approach to generate estimates of economic growth based on agents' expectations from tendency surveys. First, we design a genetic programming experiment to derive mathematical functional forms that approximate the target variable by...

We apply the two-step machine-learning method proposed by Claveria et al. (2021) to generate country-specific sentiment indicators that provide estimates of year-on-year GDP growth rates. In the first step, by means of genetic programming, business and consumer expectations are evolved to derive...

In this study we present a geometric approach to proxy economic uncertainty. We design a positional indicator of disagreement among survey-based agents' expectations about the state of the economy. Previous dispersion-based uncertainty indicators derived from business and consumer surveys...

The main objective of this study is to present a two-step approach to generate estimates of economic growth based on agents' expectations from tendency surveys. First, we design a genetic programming experiment to derive mathematical functional forms that approximate the target variable by...