Scientists agree that the climate is changing due to human activities, but there is less agreement about the specific consequences and their timeline. Disagreement among climate projections is attributable to the complexity of climate models that differ in their structure, parameters, initial conditions, etc. We examine how different sources of uncertainty affect people’s interpretation of, and...

This study examines whether firms issue capital expenditure forecasts as a commitment to not engage in expropriation of lenders through opportunistic investment activities. We find that firms with higher leverage and lower credit quality are more likely to issue capital expenditure forecasts and deviate less from the forecasts. Furthermore, for firms that issue capital expenditure forecasts, lo...

Many forecasts are conditional in nature. For example, a number of central banks routinely report forecasts conditional on particular paths of policy instruments. Even though conditional forecasting is common, there has been little work on or with methods for evaluating conditional forecasts. This paper provides analytical, Monte Carlo, and empirical evidence on tests of predictive ability for ...

We consider the possibility that respondents to the Survey of Professional Forecasters round their probability forecasts of the event that real output will decline in the future. We make various assumptions about how forecasters round their forecasts, including that individuals have constant patterns of responses across forecasts. Our primary interests are the impact of rounding on assessments ...

During the past ten years, many sets of subjective probability forecasts have been formulated on an operational or experimental basis by weather forecasters. In this paper we examine some forecasts prepared recently by National Weather Service forecasters. Samples of precipitation probability forecasts represent an operational program, while samples of probability foreclISts of temperature repr...

This paper examines a strategy for structuring one type of domain knowledge for use in extrapolation. It does so by representing information about causality and using this domain knowledge to select and combine forecasts. We use five categories to express causal impacts upon trends: growth, decay, supporting, opposing, and regressing. An identification of causal forces aided in the determinatio...

The numerical forecasts made in 1950 using the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) paved the way for the remarkable advances that have been made over the past half-century in weather prediction and climate modeling. We review the circumstances in which the forecasts were made, the nature of the ENIAC machine, and the roles of the people involved. The basis for the forecasts was...

Probabilistic forecasts of wind vectors are becoming critical as interest grows in wind as a clean and renewable source of energy, in addition to a wide range of other uses, from aviation to recreational boating. Unlike other common forecasting problems, which deal with univariate quantities, statistical approaches to wind vector forecasting must be based on bivariate distributions. The prevail...