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Overreaction in Macroeconomic Expectations

Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Yueran Ma, Andrei ShleiferEconomics计量经济学FT50
American Economic Review2020-09-01Bocconi University; Harvard University PressDOI
Citations594
Influential43
References76
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We study the rationality of individual and consensus forecasts of macroeconomic and financial variables using the methodology of Coibion and Gorodnichenko (2015), who examine predictability of forecast errors from forecast revisions. We find that individual forecasters typically overreact to news, while consensus forecasts under-react relative to full-information rational expectations. We reconcile these findings within a diagnostic expectations version of a dispersed information learning model. Structural estimation indicates that departures from Bayesian updating in the form of diagnostic overreaction capture important variation in forecast biases across different series, yielding a belief distortion parameter similar to estimates obtained in other settings. (JEL C53, D83, D84, E13, E17, E27, E47)

PredictabilityEconomicsEconometricsRationalityRational expectationsBayesian probabilityBayesian inferenceBayesian information criterionConsensus forecastDistortion (music)Computer scienceStatistics