Balance of opinion What about missing the weights?

O. Biau and N. Ferrari
Additional contact information
O. Biau: Insee
N. Ferrari: Insee

Documents de Travail de l'Insee - INSEE Working Papers from Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques

Abstract: Due to their early release, Business Tendency Surveys (BTS) are widely used in short term forecasting. Their questions are mainly qualitative; answers are most often used to calculate balances of opinions, which are defined as the difference between the proportions of positive answers with respect to the negative ones. These indicators are then used by forecasters as explanatory variables in econometric models. The balances of opinions are generally weighted with the firm size. However, there is no theoretical evidence of the efficiency of this kind of weighting. We propose here a model which aims at determining optimum weights; these weights should allow us to optimize the forecast of the macroeconomic variable. According to our analysis, the weights have to grow less than proportionally with the firm size. This conclusion is empirically tested through several examples derived from the French Industry BTS.

Keywords: Business Tendency Surveys; quantification; balance of opinion; short-term forecasting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C42 C53 C8 E27 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bnsp.insee.fr/ark:/12148/bc6p06zqx10/f1.pdf Document de travail de la DESE numéro G2006-12 (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:nse:doctra:g2006-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de Travail de l'Insee - INSEE Working Papers from Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by INSEE ().