The Accuracy of Individual and Group Forecasts from Business Outlook Surveys

Victor Zarnowitz

No 1053, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper reports on a comprehensive study of the distributions of summary measures of error for a large collection of quarterly multiperiod predictions of six variables representing inflation, real qrowth, unemployment,and percentage changes in nominal GNP and two of its more volatile components.The data come from surveys conducted since 1968 by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the American Statistical Association and cover more than 70 individuals professionally engaged in forecasting the course of the U. S.economy (mostly economists, analysts, and executives from the world of corporate business and finance). There is considerable differentiation among these forecasts, across the individuals, variables, and predictive horizons covered. Combining corresponding predictions from different sources can result insignificant gains; thus the group mean forecasts are on the average over timemore accurate than most of the corresponding sets of individual forecasts. But there is also a moderate deqree of consistency in the relative performance of a sufficient number of the survey members, as evidenced in positive rank correlations among ratios of the individual to group root mean square errors.

Date: 1982-12
Note: EFG
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Zarnowitz, Victor. "The Accuracy of Individual and Group Forecasts from Business Outlook Surveys." Journal of Forecasting, Vol. 3, No. 1, (January-March 1984), pp. 11-26.
Published as Victor Zarnowitz, 1992. "The Accuracy of Individual and Group Forecasts," NBER Chapters, in: Business Cycles: Theory, History, Indicators, and Forecasting, pages 444-461 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w1053.pdf (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:nbr:nberwo:1053

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w1053

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().