Previous empirical studies on the “rationality” of economic and financial forecasts generally test for generic properties such as bias or autocorrelated errors but provide only limited insight into the behavior behind inefficient forecasts. This paper tests for a specific form of forecast bias. In particular, we examine whether expert consensus forecasts of monthly economic releases are systematically biased toward the value of previous months’ releases. Such a bias would be consistent with the anchoring and adjustment heuristic described by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) or could arise from professional forecasters’ strategic incentives. We find broad-based and significant evidence for this form of bias, which in some cases results in sizable predictable forecast errors. To investigate whether market participants’ expectations are influenced by this bias, we examine interest rate reactions to economic news. We find that bond yields react only to the residual, or unpredictable, component of the forecast error and not to the component induced by anchoring, suggesting that expectations of market participants anticipate this bias embedded in expert forecasts.

We propose a novel human capital model that decomposes aggregate income risk into highand low-income risk. We find that high-income risk is priced, while low-income risk is insignificant. The high-income factor alone explains 77% of the cross-sectional variation in the twenty-five size and book-to-market portfolios, earns a risk premium of about 7% per year, and its pricing power extends to the full cross-section of individual stocks. It is also related to the value factor, suggesting that the value premium might be compensation for income risk. Overall, our evidence indicates that high-income risk is an important macroeconomic risk factor.

We propose a novel human capital model that decomposes aggregate income risk into high- and low-income risk. We find that high-income risk is priced, while low-income risk is insignificant. The high-income factor alone explains 77% of the cross-sectional variation in the twenty-five size and book-to-market portfolios, earns a risk premium of about 7% per year, and its pricing power extends to the full cross-section of individual stocks. It is also related to the value factor, suggesting that the value premium might be compensation for income risk. Overall, our evidence indicates that high-income risk is an important macroeconomic risk factor.