The Role of Data Revisions and Disagreement in Professional Forecasts

This paper aims at evaluating individual expectation accuracy of professional forecasters for 57 U.S., European, and German macroeconomic indicators over the period 1999-2010. The empirical analysis shows that initial announcements are partly considerably revised, and that some revisions occur systematically. Taking into account whether announcements are revised systematically and whether economists (assumingly) aim at forecasting the initial release or the latest revision, signi cant differences can be observed with regard to forecasters' expectation errors. In general, forecasters that are (assumingly) aiming to predict the latest revisions of German indicators are able to form better forecasts if these indicators are revised systematically. Though to a lower extent, this relationship is also observable regarding U.S. indicators. Forecasters' disagreement about fundamentals is higher during recessions and when stock markets are volatile

Response of Stock Markets to Monetary Policy: An Asian Stock Market Perspective

We estimate the response of Asian stock market prices to exogenous monetary policy shocks using a vector error correction model. In our paper, monetary policy transmits to stock market price through three routes: money by itself, exchange rate, and inflation. Our result points to the fact that stock prices increase persistently in response to an exogenous easing monetary policy. Variance deposition results show that, after 10 periods, the forecast error variance of beyond 53% of the Tehran Stock Exchange Price Index (TEPIX) can be explained by exogenous shocks to the US dollar-Iranian rial exchange rate, while this ratio for exogenous shocks to Iranian real gross domestic product was only 17%. We argue that such evidence can be accounted for by an endogenous response of the stock prices to the monetary policy shocks

Measuring the NAIRU with Reduced Uncertainty: A Multiple-Indicator Common-Cycle Approach

Standard estimates of the NAIRU or natural rate of unemployment are subject to considerable uncertainty. We show in this paper that using multiple indicators to extract an estimated NAIRU cuts in half uncertainty as measured by variance and gives a 33% reduction in the confidence band. The inclusion of an Okun's Law relation is particularly valuable. The essential notion is the existence of a common cyclical force driving the macroeconomic variables. Model comparisons based on the use of Bayes factors favor the idea of a common cyclical component. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Destruction of superconductivity through phase fluctuations in ultrathin a -MoGe films

Superconductivity occurs in metals when attractive interactions between electrons promote the formation of Cooper pairs which get locked in a phase-coherent state, leading to superfluid behavior. In situations where the phase stiffness falls below the pairing energy, the superconducting transition temperature Tc is driven by phase fluctuations and pairing can continue to survive above Tc. Such a behavior has long been thought of as the hallmark of unconventional superconductivity. Here we combine sub-K scanning tunneling spectroscopy, magnetic penetration depth measurements, and magnetotransport measurements to show that in ultrathin amorphous MoGe (a-MoGe) films the superfluid density is strongly suppressed by quantum phase fluctuations at low temperatures for thickness below 5 nm. This is associated with a rapid decrease in the superconducting transition temperature Tc and the emergence of a pronounced pseudogap above Tc. These observations suggest that even in conventional superconductors strong disorder and low dimensionality will ultimately trigger a Bosonic route for the destruction of superconductivity