Recruiting competent personnel is crucial for the success of any organization, especially in competitive sports where the success of teams depends upon the quality of players selected. This paper examines whether football executives are able to forecast who will be the most successful...

Fildes and Stekler’s (2002) survey of the state of knowledge about the quality of economic forecasts focused primarily on US and UK data. This paper will draw on some of their findings but it will not examine any additional US forecasts. The purpose is to determine whether their results are...

A great amount of effort is spent in forecasting the outcome of sporting events, but few papers have focused exclusively on the characteristics of sports forecasts. Rather, many papers have been written about the efficiency of sports betting markets. As it turns out, it is possible to derive...

The Census Bureau makes periodic long-term forecasts of both the total US population and the population of each of the states. Previous evaluations of these forecasts were based on the magnitude of the discrepancies between the projected and actual population figures. However, it might be...

Previous research on defining and measuring consensus (agreement) among forecasters has been concerned with evaluation of forecasts of continuous variables. This previous work is not relevant when the forecasts involve binary decisions: up-down or win-lose. In this paper we use Cohen¡¯s kappa...

In setting monetary policy, the Federal Open Market Committee uses forecasts and other information to assess the current and future states of the US economy. Numerous studies have evaluated the Greenbook forecasts but did not determine why a forecast was made, what factors were considered or the...

In this paper we present an evaluation of forecasts of a vector of variables of the German economy made by different institutions. Our method permits one to evaluate the forecasts for each year and then if one is interested to combine the years. We use our method to determine an overall winner...

A great amount of effort is spent in forecasting the outcome of sporting events, but few papers have focused exclusively on the characteristics of sports forecasts. Rather, many papers have been written about the efficiency of sports betting markets. As it turns out, it is possible to derive...

This paper asks whether the accuracy of German macroeconomic forecasts has improved over time. We examine one-year-ahead forecasts of rates of real GDP growth and inflation for the years 1967 to 2010 by three major German forecasters and the OECD. We find that overall error levels are high but...