 Are entrepreneurs' forecasts of economic indicators biased?Cees Gorter, Peter Nijkamp, Eric Pels and Sytze Rienstra Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 2001, vol. 13, issue 1, 81-95 Abstract: Insight into the investment behaviour of firms is central in understanding economic dynamics. A critical question, however, is whether firms provide sufficiently reliable data to enable them to make plausible forecasts at the meso (regional or sectoral) level. This paper analyses Dutch investment forecasts at different levels of aggregation. The central research question is whether entrepreneurs, individually or as a group, make systematic errors in their investment forecasts. A statistical test reveals that investment forecasts are not biased at the aggregated (regional and sectoral) level. At the micro level, however, there is a significant bias. Hence, using aggregated (regional and sectoral) data to test the lack of bias (unbiasedness) of forecasts may lead to the wrong conclusions. Moreover, aggregated investment forecasts may then be an inappropriate source for policy recommendations, despite their seemingly high reliability. This finding may in principle be valid for many European countries, since data collection on investment is organized in similar ways throughout Europe. Date: 2001 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:entreg:v:13:y:2001:i:1:p:81-95 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/08985620010004098 Access Statistics for this article Entrepreneurship & Regional Development is currently edited by Professor Alistair Anderson More articles in Entrepreneurship & Regional Development from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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