NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

The Informational Content of Ex Ante Forecasts

Ray C. Fair, Robert J. Shiller

NBER Working Paper No. 2503 (Also Reprint No. r1310)*
Issued in November 1989
NBER Program(s):   EFG

The informational content of different forecasts can be compared by regressing the actual change in a variable to be forecasted on forecasts of the change. We use the procedure in Fair and Shiller (1987) to examine the informational content of three sets of ex ant. forecasts: the American Statistical Association and National Bureau of Economic Research Survey (ASA), Data Resources Incorporated (DRI), and Wharton Economic Forecasting Associates (UEFA). We compare these forecasts to each other and to "quasi ex ante" forecasts generated from a vector autoregressive model, an autoregressive components model, and a large-scale structural model (the Fair model).

*Published: The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. LXXI, No. 2, pp. 325-331,(May 1989).

You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.

Information about Free Papers

You should expect a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate associate of the NBER, a journalist, a site with your domain name in ".GOV", or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy.

If you usually get free papers at work/university but do not at home, you can either connect to your work VPN or proxy (if any) or elect to have a link to the paper emailed to your work email address below. The email address must be connected to a subscribing college, university, or other subscribing institution. Gmail and other free email addresses will not have access.

E-mail:

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

 
Publications
Activities
Meetings
Data
People
About

National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-868-3900; email: info@nber.org