The Accuracy of the Commerce-S.E.C. Sales Anticipations
ECONOMISTS have been interested in the accuracy of anticipations for two reasons. First, effective countercyclical policy depends on accurate forecasts of future investment, inventories, sales, etc. Second, the degree of accuracy of anticipations has implications about the way anticipations are formed. This paper deals with the accuracy of sales anticipations. The source of the data on anticipations is the Annual Survey of Business Anticipations of Sales collected by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Commerce. The only systematic study of these data has been conducted by Modigliani and Weingartner.2 In the first section, we test whether sales anticipations are more accurate than the forecasts of several naive models and whether anticipations correctly predict the direction of change of sales. Next, we test Theil's hypothesis that predictions refer to a shorter period than they are supposed to. In the last section of the paper, an accuracy measure proposed by Theil is adopted to determine (1) whether an accurate forecaster is less likely to commit systematic forecasting errors and (2) whether anticipations conform to the rational expectations hypothesis. Nature of the Data
- DOI
- 10.2307/1924049
- Volume
- 46 (4)
- Pages
- 398
- Export
- BibTeX
- Sources
- openalex crossref