Premium
Direct Evidence on Sticky Information from the Revision Behavior of Professional Forecasters
Author(s) -
Mitchell Karlyn,
Pearce Douglas K.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
southern economic journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.762
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 2325-8012
pISSN - 0038-4038
DOI - 10.1002/soej.12236
Subject(s) - survey of professional forecasters , economics , sample (material) , econometrics , set (abstract data type) , unemployment , monetary economics , computer science , monetary policy , macroeconomics , chemistry , chromatography , programming language
We provide evidence on the sticky‐information model of Mankiw and Reis ([Mankiw, N. Gregory, 2002]) by examining how often individual professional forecasters revise their forecasts. We draw interest rate and unemployment rate forecasts from the monthly Wall Street Journal surveys. We find evidence that forecasters frequently leave forecasts unchanged but revise more often the larger the changes in the information set; additionally, the information sensitivity of revision frequencies increased after 2007. We also find that, on average, forecasters in our sample revise more frequently than found in previous research but that revised forecasts are not consistently more accurate.