  In this study we present a metric of consensus for Likert scales. The measure
gives the level of agreement as the percentage of consensus among respondents.
The proposed framework allows to design a positional indicator that gives the
degree of agreement for each item independently of the number of reply options.
In order to assess the performance of the proposed metric of consensus, in an
iterated one-period ahead forecasting experiment we test whether the inclusion
of the degree of agreement in expectations regarding the evolution of
unemployment improves out-of-sample forecast accuracy in eight European
countries. We find evidence that the degree of agreement among consumers
contains useful information to predict unemployment rates. These results show
the usefulness of consensus-based metrics to track the evolution of economic
variables.
