Experts can rely on statistical model forecasts when creating their own forecasts. Usually it is not known what experts actually do. In this paper we focus on three questions, which we try to answer given the availability of expert forecasts and model forecasts. First, is the expert forecast...

This paper revisits the accuracy of inflation forecasting using activity and expectations variables. We apply Bayesian model averaging across different regression specifications selected from a set of potential predictors that includes lagged values of inflation, a host of real activity data,...

In this paper we study what professional forecasters predict. We use spectral analysis and state space modeling to decompose economic time series into a trend, business-cycle, and irregular component. To examine which components are captured by professional forecasters, we regress their...

We propose a new and simple methodology to estimate the loss function associated with experts' forecasts. Under the assumption of conditional normality of the data and the forecast distribution, the asymmetry parameter of the lin-lin and linex loss function can easily be estimated using a linear...