| Article ID: | iaor201526528 |
| Volume: | 34 |
| Issue: | 5 |
| Start Page Number: | 405 |
| End Page Number: | 426 |
| Publication Date: | Aug 2015 |
| Journal: | Journal of Forecasting |
| Authors: | Mokinski Frieder, Sheng Xuguang (Simon), Yang Jingyun |
| Keywords: | statistics: distributions |
We assess how well measures of disagreement in qualitative survey expectations reflect disagreement in corresponding quantitative expectations. We consider a variety of measures, belonging to two categories: measures of dispersion in nominal and ordinal variables and measures based on the probability approach of Carlson and Parkin (1975). Using data from two household surveys that collect both qualitative and quantitative inflation expectations, we find that the probability approaches with time-varying categorization thresholds and either a piecewise uniform or t distribution perform best and the resulting disagreement estimates are highly correlated with the benchmark.