A new consensus-based unemployment indicator

ABSTRACT

In this study we present a novel approach to measure the level of consensus among agents’ expectations. The proposed framework allows us to design a positional indicator that gives the percentage of agreement between survey expectations. While other aggregation methods such as the balance, which is constructed as the difference between the percentages of respondents giving positive and negative replies, explicitly omit the neutral information, the proposed metric allows synthesizing the information coming from all response categories, including the percentage of respondents who do not expect any change. In order to assess the performance of the proposed measure of consensus, we compare its ability to track the evolution of unemployment to that of the balance in eight European countries. With this aim, we scale both measures to generate one-period ahead forecasts of the unemployment rate. We find that the consensus-based unemployment indicator outperforms the balance in all countries except Denmark and Sweden, which suggests that the level of agreement among agents’ expectations is a good predictor of unemployment.

KEYWORDS:

• Unemployment
• leading indicator
• tendency surveys
• consumer expectations
• geometry

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C53
• D12
• E24
• J01
• J60

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the projects ECO2016-75805-R from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. We would like to thank the Editor and an anonymous referee for their useful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación [ECO2016-75805].