TY - BOOK AU - Bordalo,Pedro AU - Gennaioli,Nicola AU - Ma,Yueran AU - Shleifer,Andrei ED - National Bureau of Economic Research. TI - Over-reaction in Macroeconomic Expectations T2 - NBER working paper series PY - 2018/// CY - Cambridge, Mass. PB - National Bureau of Economic Research N1 - August 2018; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers N2 - We study the rationality of individual and consensus professional forecasts of macroeconomic and financial variables using the methodology of Coibion and Gorodnichenko (2015), which examines predictability of forecast errors from forecast revisions. We report two key findings: forecasters typically over-react to their individual news, while consensus forecasts under-react to average forecaster news. To reconcile these findings, we combine the diagnostic expectations model of belief formation from Bordalo, Gennaioli, and Shleifer (2018) with Woodford's (2003) noisy information model of belief dispersion. The forward looking nature of diagnostic expectations yields additional implications, which we also test and confirm. A structural estimation exercise indicates that our model captures important variation in the data, yielding a value for the belief distortion parameter similar to estimates obtained in other settings UR - https://www.nber.org/papers/w24932 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w24932 ER -