ISSN: 2281-1346 Department of Economics and Management DEM Working Paper Series Forecasters’ utility and forecast coherence Emilio Zanetti Chini (Università di Pavia) # 145 (01-18) Via San Felice, 5 I-27100 Pavia economiaweb.unipv.it Revised in: August 2018 Forecasters’ utility and forecast coherence Emilio Zanetti Chini∗ University of Pavia Department of Economics and Management Via San Felice 5 - 27100, Pavia (ITALY) e-mail:
[email protected] FIRST VERSION: December, 2017 THIS VERSION: August, 2018 Abstract We introduce a new definition of probabilistic forecasts’ coherence based on the divergence between forecasters’ expected utility and their own models’ likelihood function. When the divergence is zero, this utility is said to be local. A new micro-founded forecasting environment, the “Scoring Structure”, where the forecast users interact with forecasters, allows econometricians to build a formal test for the null hypothesis of locality. The test behaves consistently with the requirements of the theoretical literature. The locality is fundamental to set dating algorithms for the assessment of the probability of recession in U.S. business cycle and central banks’ “fan” charts Keywords: Business Cycle, Fan Charts, Locality Testing, Smooth Transition Auto-Regressions, Predictive Density, Scoring Rules and Structures. JEL: C12, C22, C44, C53. ∗This paper was initiated when the author was visiting Ph.D. student at CREATES, the Center for Research in Econometric Analysis of Time Series (DNRF78), which is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. The hospitality and the stimulating research environment provided by Niels Haldrup are gratefully acknowledged. The author is particularly grateful to Tommaso Proietti and Timo Teräsvirta for their supervision.