The Geary Seminar Series – 29th October 2024

On 29th October we welcomed Dr Diego Marino-Fages, Business School, Durham University, to our Seminar Series. Dr Diego Marino-Fages was a guest of Dr Margaret Samahita and visited Geary as part of the Geary BICS Funding Scheme. Title: Motivated Forecasts: Evidence from the Presidential Elections in Argentina Abstract: The increasing polarization in political issues could potentially affect one of the most important inputs that policymakers need to make decisions, i.e., agents' expectations (Coibion et al, 2018). I ask whether peoples’ forecasts about important economic indicators are affected by their political preferences. I conduct a pre-registered online experiment (N=1162) in a high uncertainty political context given by the 2023 presidential elections in Argentina. The experiment exogenously manipulates the incentives to report accurate forecasts about economic indicators. I find that incentivising responses reduces the gap between subjects’ forecasts regarding the performance of the different candidates and explore what drives the results.