The literature assumes that the order and timing of analysts’earnings forecasts are determined exogenously. Ignoring strategic timing decisions of analysts may lead to inconsistent estimates of investors’beliefs. The paper analyzes the equilibrium timing strategies for analysts, and derives the consistent estimates of investors’beliefs. I follow the literature in assuming that analysts care for...

Improvements in the ability to model El Niño and other large-scale interannual climate variations have allowed for the development of seasonal climate forecasts, predicting rainfall and temperature anomalies for many places around the world. These forecasts have allowed developing countries to predict shortfalls in grain yields, with benefits for food security. Several countries communicate the...

Forecasts of agricultural production and prices are intended to be useful for farmers, governments, and agribusiness industries. Because of the special position of food production in a nation’s security, governments have become both principal suppliers and main users of agricultural forecasts. They need internal forecasts to execute policies that provide technical and market support for the agr...

Given sales forecasts for a set of items along with the standard deviation associated with each forecast, we propose a new method of combining forecasts using the concepts of clustering. Clusters of items are identified based on similarity in their sales forecasts and then a common forecast (or combined forecast) is computed for each cluster of items. The objective of clustering is to minimize ...

Research on forecasting is effectively limited to forecasts that are expressed with clarity; which is to say that the forecasted event must be sufficiently well-defined so that it can be clearly resolved whether or not the event occurred and forecasts certainties are expressed as quantitative probabilities. When forecasts are expressed with clarity, then quantitative measures (scoring rules, ca...

In this paper, we re-examine the widely-held belief that analysts’ earnings per share (EPS) forecasts are superior to forecasts from a time-series model. Using a naive random walk time-series model for annual earnings, we investigate whether and when analysts’ annual forecasts are superior. We also examine whether analysts’ forecasts approximate market expectations better than expectations from...

Ahrrwx-The informational content of ditlercnt forecasts can be compared by regressing the actual change in a variable to be forecasted on forecasts of the change. We we the procedure in Fair and Shikr (1987) to examine the informational content of three sets of ex ante forecasts: the American Statist&i Association and National Bureau of Economic Research Survey (ASP.). Data Resources Incorporat...

We consider combinations of subjective survey forecasts and model-based forecasts from linear and non-linear univariate specifications as well as multivariate factor-augmented models. Empirical results suggest that a simple equal-weighted average of survey forecasts outperform the best model-based forecasts for a majority of macroeconomic variables and forecast horizons. Additional improvements...