Search Results
Briefing
Battle of the Forecasts: Mean vs. Median as the Survey of Professional Forecasters’ Consensus
In this Research Brief, we study whether the accuracy of the median forecast in fact exceeds that of the mean forecast. Because we want the results of our study to be as robust as possible, we examine the forecasts for six important survey variables over five forecast horizons, using four alternative measures of the realizations from which we compute the forecast errors, and four alternative sample periods. We apply the well-known Diebol?Mariano (1995) statistical test for relative forecast accuracy between the mean and median consensus projections.
Working Paper
Economic Activity by Race
We observe empirical differences between races across various macroeconomic variables for the White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic populations in the U.S. For instance, the Black unemployment rate in the U.S. is more often than not double the White unemployment rate. In this paper, I treat nine macroeconomic variables as noisy indicators of economic activity and estimate an index that measures the economic activity of racial demographic groups in the U.S., called Economic Activity by Race (EAR). The noise of the indicators motivates the use of Kalman filter estimation to extract a common ...