Information Rigidities in Economic Growth Forecasts

Download or read book Information Rigidities in Economic Growth Forecasts written by Jonas Dovern and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2013-02-27 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We examine the behavior of forecasts for real GDP growth using a large panel of individual forecasts from 30 advanced and emerging economies during 1989–2010. Our main findings are as follows. First, our evidence does not support the validity of the sticky information model (Mankiw and Reis, 2002) for describing the dynamics of professional growth forecasts. Instead, the empirical evidence is more in line with implications of "noisy" information models (Woodford, 2002; Sims, 2003). Second, we find that information rigidities are more pronounced in emerging economies than advanced economies. Third, there is evidence of nonlinearities in forecast smoothing. It is less pronounced in the tails of the distribution of individual forecast revisions than in the central part of the distribution.