Internal consistency of survey respondents’forecasts: Evidence based on the Survey of Professional Forecasters

We ask whether the di¤erent types of forecasts made by individual survey respondents are mutually consistent, using the SPF survey data. We compare the point forecasts and central tendencies of proba-bility distributions matched by individual respondent, and compare the forecast probabilities of declines in output with the probabilities implied by the probability distributions. When the expected associa-tions between these di¤erent types of forecasts do not hold for some idividuals, we consider whether the discrepancies we observe are consistent with rational behaviour by agents with asymmetric loss functions. Journal of Economic Literature classi\u85cation: C53, E32, E3