In this article we present four diversified approaches to forecasting main macroeconomic variables without a priori assumptions concerning causality. We include tendency survey data in both the Bayesian averaging of classical estimates (BACE) and the dynamic factor models (DFM) frameworks. With...

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...

We examine the effect of the common ownership relation between brokerage houses and the firms covered by their analysts (referred to as co-owned brokerage houses, co-owned firms, and connected analysts, respectively) on analyst forecast performance. Common ownership can help the connected...

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...

Survey forecasts are prone to entry and exit of forecasters as well as forecasters not contributing every period leading to gaps. These gaps make it difficult to compare individual forecasters to each other and raises the question of how to deal with the missing observations. This is addressed...

In density forecasts, respondents are asked to assign probabilities to pre-specifted ranges of inflation. We show in two large-scale experiments that responses vary when we modify the response scale. Asking an identical question with modifted response scales induces different answers: Shifting,...

The aim of this paper is to construct a forecasting model oriented on predicting basic macroeconomic variables, namely: the GDP growth rate, the unemployment rate, and the consumer price inflation. In order to select the set of the best regressors, Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimators...

Economic agents are aware to incur in a loss basing their decisions on their own extrapolations instead of sound statistical data, but the loss could be smaller than the one related to waiting for the dissemination of final data. A broad guidance in deciding when statistical offices should...

We investigate the accuracy of capital investment predictors from a national business survey of South African manufacturing. Based on data available to correspondents at the time of survey completion, we propose variables that might inform the confidence that can be attached to their...

Outliers are observations that deviate significantly from the norm, and their detection has been a critical topic in various research areas and application domains, such as video surveillance, network intrusion detection, and disease outbreak detection. In recent years, deep learning-based...