Abstract
Each person's characteristics may influence that person's behaviors and their outcomes. We
build and use a new database to estimate experts' performance and boldness based on their
experience and characteristics. We classify experts providing inflation forecasts based on their
education, experience, gender, and environment. We provide alternative interpretations of
factors affecting experts' inflation forecasting performance, boldness, and pessimism by linking
behavioral economics, the economics of education, and forecasting literature. An expert with
previous experience at a central bank appears to have a lower propensity for predicting deflation.