Over-Reaction in Macroeconomic Expectations

81 Pages Posted: 28 Aug 2018 Last revised: 15 Feb 2023

See all articles by Pedro Bordalo

Pedro Bordalo

University of Oxford - Said Business School

Nicola Gennaioli

Bocconi University - Department of Finance

Yueran Ma

University of Chicago - Booth School of Business

Andrei Shleifer

Harvard University - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

Date Written: August 2018

Abstract

We study the rationality of individual and consensus professional forecasts of macroeconomic and financial variables using the methodology of Coibion and Gorodnichenko (2015), which examines predictability of forecast errors from forecast revisions. We report two key findings: forecasters typically over-react to their individual news, while consensus forecasts under-react to average forecaster news. To reconcile these findings, we combine the diagnostic expectations model of belief formation from Bordalo, Gennaioli, and Shleifer (2018) with Woodford’s (2003) noisy information model of belief dispersion. The forward looking nature of diagnostic expectations yields additional implications, which we also test and confirm. A structural estimation exercise indicates that our model captures important variation in the data, yielding a value for the belief distortion parameter similar to estimates obtained in other settings

Suggested Citation

Bordalo, Pedro and Gennaioli, Nicola and Ma, Yueran and Shleifer, Andrei, Over-Reaction in Macroeconomic Expectations (August 2018). NBER Working Paper No. w24932, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3239268

Pedro Bordalo (Contact Author)

University of Oxford - Said Business School ( email )

Park End Street
Oxford, OX1 1HP
Great Britain

Nicola Gennaioli

Bocconi University - Department of Finance ( email )

Via Roentgen 1
Milano, MI 20136
Italy

Yueran Ma

University of Chicago - Booth School of Business ( email )

5807 S. Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
United States

Andrei Shleifer

Harvard University - Department of Economics ( email )

Littauer Center
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
617-495-5046 (Phone)
617-496-1708 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/~ashleife/

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

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European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

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Belgium

HOME PAGE: http://www.ecgi.org

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