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and the late Werner Troesken. James Feigenbaum, Matt Jaremski, and Suresh Naidu generously shared data with us for the project. Brian Lee provided excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Die Dis cus si on Pape rs die nen einer mög lichst schnel len Ver brei tung von neue ren For schungs arbei ten des ZEW. Die Bei trä ge lie gen in allei ni ger Ver ant wor tung der Auto ren und stel len nicht not wen di ger wei se die Mei nung des ZEW dar.Dis cus si on Papers are inten ded to make results of ZEW research prompt ly avai la ble to other eco no mists in order to encou ra ge dis cus si on and sug gesti ons for revi si ons. The aut hors are sole ly respon si ble for the con tents which do not neces sa ri ly repre sent the opi ni on of the ZEW.Download this ZEW Discussion Paper from our ftp server:ftp://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/dp/dp07058.pdf Non-technical summaryThe last decade has seen marked economic fluctuations in the major industrial countries, which regularly present business cycle forecasters with a challenge. In this paper we are interested in how professional forecasters managed to predict GDP and price developments during the last decade. To this end, we explore the accuracy and evolution of the Consensus Forecast for twelve industrial countries for the years 1996 to 2006. This pooled forecast has the main advantage that it offers monthly publications of revised forecasts for the current and the next year, so that an explicit revision process of 24 forecasts for every target year can be observed.The theoretical and econometric analysis is based on the framework of Davies and Lahiri (1995) and Clements et al. (2006). The latter employ a pooling procedure which permits the evaluation of all forecasts for each target variable over 24 horizons simultaneously. Adopting this methodology allows us to draw conclusions on evaluating systematic forecast bias and, by applying a test on the predictability of forecast revisions, on the efficient use of new information for all forecast horizons jointly. It is shown how the pooled approach needs to be adjusted in order to accommodate the forecasting scheme of the Consensus Forecasts.Furthermore, the pooled approach is extended by a sequential test with the purpose of detecting the critical horizon beyond which the forecast should be regarded as biased.Moreover, we show how the pooled tests for the predictability of forecast revisions can be improved by taking heteroscedasticity in the form of target year-specific variances of macroeconomic shocks into account.In the empirical part we first present results in the form of analytical confidence intervals surrounding the horizon-specific bias estimates which allow intuitive and meaningful interpretations. The test for common bias reveals that several countries show biased forecasts, especially with forecasts covering more than 12 months. These results partially confirm the presumption that the macroeconomic forecasts for the past 10 years were severely affected by the pronounced shocks in that period. The fact that for individual countries systematic biases can be observed by applying the Consensus Forecasts reveals that in these countries the forecasting industry on the whole was not able to cope with the shoc...

Building on the idea that religious communities provide mutual insurance against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious membership is more valuable in societies exposed to greater common risk. In our empirical analysis we exploit rainfall risk as a source of common economic risk in the nineteenth-century United States and show that religious communities were larger in counties where they faced greater rainfall risk. The link between rainfall risk and the size of religious communities is stronger in counties that were more agricultural, that had lower population densities, or that were exposed to greater rainfall risk during the growing season.

The introduction of immigration quotas in the 1920s fundamentally changed U.S. immigration policy. We exploit this policy change to estimate the economic consequences of immigration restrictions for the U.S. economy. The implementation of the quota system led to a long-lasting relative decline in population growth in areas with larger pre-existing immigrant communities of affected nationalities. This effect was largely driven by the policy-restricted supply of immigrants from quota-affected nationalities and lower fertility of first-and second-generation immigrant women. In the more affected areas labor productivity growth in manufacturing declined substantially and native workers were pushed into lower-wage occupations. While native white workers faced sizable earnings losses, black workers benefited from the quota system and improved their relative economic status within the more affected areas.

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This paper examines the relationship between immigrants' genetic diversity and economic development in the United States during the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a period commonly referred to as the age of mass migration from Europe to the New World. Our panel model estimates show that during this period, immigrants' genetic diversity is significantly positively correlated with measures of U.S. counties' economic development. There exists also a significant positive relationship between immigrants' genetic diversity in 1870 and contemporaneous measures of U.S. counties' average income. (JEL J11, O51, Z13)