Companies making initial public offerings in Greece were obliged to include next year‟s profit in the new issue prospectuses until the regulations changed to voluntary status. This study takes advantage of these two regulatory regimes and compares the accuracy of earnings forecasts under both mandatory and voluntary disclosure environments. Findings indicate behavioural change, as pessimistic e...

This paper brings together two important but hitherto largely unrelated areas of the forecasting literature, density forecasting and forecast combination. It proposes a simple data-driven approach to direct combination of density forecasts using optimal weights. These optimal weights are those weights that minimise the ‘distance’, as measured by the Kullback-Leibler Information Criterion, betwe...

This paper develops and compares two theories of strategic behavior of professional forecasters. The first theory posits that forecasters compete in a forecasting contest with pre-specified rules. In equilibrium of a winner-take-all contest, forecasts are excessively differentiated. According to the alternative reputational cheap talk theory, forecasters aim at convincing the market that they a...

We examine analysts’ motives to issue long-term earning growth (LTG) forecasts. We find that analysts are more likely to issue LTG forecasts when their incentive to please managers is strong. In addition, analysts are more likely to choose firms that they are more optimistic about for LTG coverage. We find mixed evidence regarding whether analysts issue LTG forecasts to signal their ability or ...

This paper investigates forecasts of US in#ation at the 12-month horizon. The starting point is the conventional unemployment rate Phillips curve, which is examined in a simulated out-of-sample forecasting framework. In#ation forecasts produced by the Phillips curve generally have been more accurate than forecasts based on other macroeconomic variables, including interest rates, money and commo...

Winter 2009 Issue 12 FORESIGHT One of the major findings of forecasting research over the last quarter century has been that greater predictive accuracy can often be achieved by combining forecasts from different methods or sources. Combination can be a process as straightforward as taking a simple average of the different forecasts, in which case the constituent forecasts are all weighted equa...

Considerable literature has accumulated over the years regarding the combination of forecasts. The primary conclusion of this line of research is that forecast accuracy can be substantially improved through the combination of multiple individual forecasts. Furthermore, simple combination methods often work reasonably well relative to more complex combinations. This paper provides a review and a...

When evaluating differences between competing precipitation forecasts, formal hypothesis testing is rarely performed. This may be due to the difficulty in applying common tests given the spatial correlation of and nonnormality of errors. Possible ways around these difficulties are explored here. Two datasets of precipitation forecasts are evaluated, a set of two competing gridded precipitation ...

This study presents a new simple approach for combining empirical with raw (i.e., not bias corrected) coupled model ensemble forecasts in order to make more skillful interval forecasts of ENSO. A Bayesian normal model has been used to combine empirical and raw coupled model December SST Niño-3.4 index forecasts started at the end of the preceding July (5-month lead time). The empirical forecast...

Whereas previous studies on how people make forecasts of sports events focused primarily on experts, we examined how laypeople do this task. In particular, we (a) tested the recognition heuristic [Goldstein, D. G., & Gigerenzer, G. (2002). Models of ecological rationality: the recognition heuristic. Psychological Review, 109, 75-90], which requires partial ignorance, against four alternative me...