Do forecasters inform or reassure?

Konstantin Kholodilin () and Boriss Siliverstovs

No 09-215, KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich

Abstract: The paper evaluates the quality of the German national accounting data (GDP and its use-side components) as measured by the magnitude and dispersion of the forecast/ revision errors. It is demonstrated that government consumption series are the least reliable, whereas real GDP and real private consumption data are the most reliable. In addition, early forecasts of GDP, private consumption, and investment growth rates are shown to be systematically upward biased. Finally, early forecasts of all the variables seem to be no more accurate than naive forecasts based on the historical mean of the final data.

Keywords: Quality of statistical data; real-time data; signal-to-noise ratio; forecasts; revisions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2009-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-eec and nep-for
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-005778341 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kof:wpskof:09-215

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().