IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/vfsc19/203501.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Economic Sentiment in Europe: Disentangling Private Information from Public Knowledge

Author

Listed:
  • Lindner, Axel
  • Heinisch, Katja

Abstract

This paper addresses a general problem with surveys asking agents for their assessment of the state of the economy: answers are highly dependent on information that is publicly available, while only information that is not already publicly known has the potential to improve a professional forecast. We propose a simple procedure to disentangle the private information of agents from knowledge that is already publicly known (that is common knowledge) for surveys that are structured like that for the European Commission's consumer sentiment indicator. We show that, empirically, this procedure works quite well for some economies, in particular for Germany.

Suggested Citation

  • Lindner, Axel & Heinisch, Katja, 2019. "Economic Sentiment in Europe: Disentangling Private Information from Public Knowledge," VfS Annual Conference 2019 (Leipzig): 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall - Democracy and Market Economy 203501, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:vfsc19:203501
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/203501/1/VfS-2019-pid-25770.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ottaviani, Marco & Sorensen, Peter Norman, 2006. "The strategy of professional forecasting," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(2), pages 441-466, August.
    2. Morris, Stephen & Shin, Hyun Song, 1998. "Unique Equilibrium in a Model of Self-Fulfilling Currency Attacks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(3), pages 587-597, June.
    3. Christian Dreger & Konstantin Arkadievich Kholodilin, 2013. "Forecasting Private Consumption by Consumer Surveys," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32(1), pages 10-18, January.
    4. Diebold, Francis X & Mariano, Roberto S, 2002. "Comparing Predictive Accuracy," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(1), pages 134-144, January.
    5. Maria Antoinette Silgoner, 2008. "The Economic Sentiment Indicator: Leading Indicator - Properties in Old and New EU Member States," Journal of Business Cycle Measurement and Analysis, OECD Publishing, Centre for International Research on Economic Tendency Surveys, vol. 2007(2), pages 199-215.
    6. Lindner Axel, 2009. "Evaluating Communication Strategies for Public Agencies: Transparency, Opacity, and Secrecy," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 9(1), pages 1-18, July.
    7. Sreyoshi Das & Camelia M Kuhnen & Stefan Nagel, 2020. "Socioeconomic Status and Macroeconomic Expectations," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 33(1), pages 395-432.
    8. Sarah Gelper & Christophe Croux, 2010. "On the Construction of the European Economic Sentiment Indicator," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 72(1), pages 47-62, February.
    9. Trueman, Brett, 1994. "Analyst Forecasts and Herding Behavior," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 7(1), pages 97-124.
    10. Annabelle Mourougane & Moreno Roma, 2003. "Can confidence indicators be useful to predict short term real GDP growth?," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(8), pages 519-522.
    11. Harvey, David & Leybourne, Stephen & Newbold, Paul, 1997. "Testing the equality of prediction mean squared errors," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 281-291, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Heinisch, Katja & Lindner, Axel, 2021. "Economic sentiment: Disentangling private information from public knowledge," IWH Discussion Papers 15/2021, Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).
    2. Isabel Figuerola‐Ferretti & Alejandro Rodríguez & Eduardo Schwartz, 2021. "Oil price analysts' forecasts," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(9), pages 1351-1374, September.
    3. Mouratidis, Kostas, 2008. "Evaluating currency crises: A Bayesian Markov switching approach," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 30(4), pages 1688-1711, December.
    4. Claveria, Oscar & Monte, Enric & Torra, Salvador, 2020. "Economic forecasting with evolved confidence indicators," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 576-585.
    5. Gkillas, Konstantinos & Gupta, Rangan & Pierdzioch, Christian, 2020. "Forecasting realized oil-price volatility: The role of financial stress and asymmetric loss," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 104(C).
    6. Dal Bianco, Marcos & Camacho, Maximo & Perez Quiros, Gabriel, 2012. "Short-run forecasting of the euro-dollar exchange rate with economic fundamentals," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 377-396.
    7. Máximo Camacho & Rafael Doménech, 2012. "MICA-BBVA: a factor model of economic and financial indicators for short-term GDP forecasting," SERIEs: Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, Springer;Spanish Economic Association, vol. 3(4), pages 475-497, December.
    8. Goodness C. Aye & Stephen M. Miller & Rangan Gupta & Mehmet Balcilar, 2016. "Forecasting US real private residential fixed investment using a large number of predictors," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 51(4), pages 1557-1580, December.
    9. Chuliá, Helena & Garrón, Ignacio & Uribe, Jorge M., 2024. "Daily growth at risk: Financial or real drivers? The answer is not always the same," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 40(2), pages 762-776.
    10. Mehmet Balcilar & Rangan Gupta & Stephen M. Miller, 2015. "The out-of-sample forecasting performance of nonlinear models of regional housing prices in the US," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(22), pages 2259-2277, May.
    11. Jonathan Berrisch & Florian Ziel, 2023. "Multivariate Probabilistic CRPS Learning with an Application to Day-Ahead Electricity Prices," Papers 2303.10019, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2024.
    12. Cukierman, Alex & Lustenberger, Thomas, 2017. "International evidence on professional interest rates forecasts: The impact of forecasting ability," CEPR Discussion Papers 12489, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    13. Sucarrat, Genaro, 2009. "Forecast Evaluation of Explanatory Models of Financial Variability," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 3, pages 1-33.
    14. Massimiliano Marzo & Paolo Zagaglia, 2010. "Volatility forecasting for crude oil futures," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(16), pages 1587-1599.
    15. Bespalova, Olga, 2018. "Forecast Evaluation in Macroeconomics and International Finance. Ph.D. thesis, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA," MPRA Paper 117706, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Mittnik, Stefan & Robinzonov, Nikolay & Spindler, Martin, 2015. "Stock market volatility: Identifying major drivers and the nature of their impact," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 1-14.
    17. Lahiri, Kajal & Yang, Liu, 2013. "Forecasting Binary Outcomes," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1025-1106, Elsevier.
    18. Magnus Reif, 2020. "Macroeconomics, Nonlinearities, and the Business Cycle," ifo Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsforschung, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, number 87.
    19. Robert Lehmann, 2021. "Forecasting exports across Europe: What are the superior survey indicators?," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 60(5), pages 2429-2453, May.
    20. Naser, Hanan, 2016. "Estimating and forecasting the real prices of crude oil: A data rich model using a dynamic model averaging (DMA) approach," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 75-87.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    private information; public information; consumer confidence; survey data;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • E37 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications
    • C83 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Data Collection and Data Estimation Methodology; Computer Programs - - - Survey Methods; Sampling Methods

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:vfsc19:203501. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfsocea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.