We document a walk-down in gross domestic product (GDP) growth projections that is akin to that in sell-side analysts’ earnings forecasts. While the walk-down in earnings forecasts has been generally attributed to the strategic interplay between corporate managers and sell-side analysts, professional macro forecasters affiliated with the Federal Reserve are less susceptible to outside pressure. Our evidence shows that countercyclical variation in forecasting difficulty, due to asymmetry in the steepness of economic downturns relative to upturns, is relevant in explaining the walk-down in macro forecasts. Without rejecting the expectations game between managers and sell-side analysts, our article offers a more auspicious characterization of forecast walk-downs whereby such patterns can surface even without conditioning on strategic incentives for bias. An overarching implication is that research on the properties of sell-side analysts’ forecasts should consider strategic incentives for bias interacted with information about the state of the economy and heterogeneity in the cyclical exposure of individual firms.

我们记录的国内生产总值（GDP）增长预测下降，与卖方分析师的收益预测类似。尽管收益预测的下降通常归因于公司经理和卖方分析师之间的战略相互作用，但与美联储相关的专业宏观预测员却较不容易受到外界压力的影响。我们的证据表明，由于经济下滑相对于上升趋势的不对称性，预测难度的反周期变化与解释宏观预测的下调有关。在不拒绝经理与卖方分析师之间的期望博弈的情况下，我们的文章提供了对预测下调的更为吉祥的描述，即使没有以偏见的战略性激励为条件，这种模式也可以浮现。一个最重要的含义是，对卖方分析师的预测属性的研究应考虑与单个公司的周期性风险中的经济状况和异质性信息相互作用的，对偏差的战略诱因。