Crowdsourcing Economic Forecasts

Natural Gas Storage Forecasts: Is the Crowd Wiser?

“…Prior literature shows that crowdsourced forecasts are incrementally useful in forecasting firm earnings (Adebambo et al, 2016;Jame et al, 2016Jame et al, , 2017 or U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls (Aguilar et al, 2019). The second contribution of our paper is in showing the absence of similar results for natural gas storage announcements.…”

“…Focusing on U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls, Aguilar et al (2019) find that when professional analysts are uncertain and herd together, crowdsourced forecasts tend to be more accurate. In this section, we examine whether forecast accuracy differs during periods of uncertainty (proxied by the dispersion measure) and high herding activity (proxied by the boldness measure) among Reuters analysts.…”

“…Major U.S. indicators consistently receive close to 50 estimates per release, whereas international indicators typically receive less than 20. Data from Estimize has been used in prior studies investigating crowdsourced forecasts of firm earnings (e.g., Adebambo et al, 2016;Jame et al, 2016Jame et al, , 2017 and U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls (Aguilar et al, 2019).…”

“…Although forecasts by professional analysts are more accurate on average than forecasts by the crowds, forecasts by the most credible crowd analyst with proven historical accuracy could provide additional information or even be superior to forecasts by the professional (Aguilar et al, 2019). To examine this possibility, we compare forecast accuracy of the best forecasters in Estimize with forecast accuracy of the best forecasters in Reuters.…”