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We used the oil-price forecasts of the 'Survey of Professional Forecasters' published by the European Central Bank to analyze whether oil-price forecasters herd or anti-herd. Oil-price forecasts are consistent with herding (anti-herding) of forecasters if forecasts are biased towards (away from) the consensus forecast. Based on a new empirical test developed by Bernhardt et al. (J. Financ. Econ. 80: 657-675, 2006), we found strong evidence of anti-herding among oil-price forecasters.
We use data from the Consensus Economics Forecast Poll to analyze how current account forecasters form expectations. Our results suggest that forecasts do not satisfy traditional unbiasedness and orthogonality criteria for forecast rationality. In addition, we find anti-herding behavior among forecasters for the Euro area and G7 countries. We also show that the cross-sectional heterogeneity in anti-herding is associated with cross-sectional heterogeneity in forecast accuracy. More specifically, we find some evidence indicating that forecasters who tend to herd provide more accurate forecasts than their colleagues who follow an anti-herding strategy.