Are oil-price-forecasters finally right? -- Regressive expectations towards more fundamental values of the oil price

Reitz, Stefan and Ruelke, Jan and Stadtmann, Georg (2009): Are oil-price-forecasters finally right? -- Regressive expectations towards more fundamental values of the oil price.

Abstract

We use oil price forecasts from the Consensus Economic Forecast poll to analyze how forecaster build their expectations. Our findings point into the direction that the extrapolative as well as the regressive expectation formation hypothesis play a role. Standard measures of forecast accuracy reveal forecasters' underperformance relative to the random-walk benchmark. However, it seems that this result might be biased due to peso problems.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Oil price, survey data, forecast bias, peso problem
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty > D84 - Expectations ; Speculations

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