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Surveying Business Uncertainty

NBER Working Paper Series, 2019-06, p.25956

Copyright National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. Jun 2019 ;ISSN: 0898-2937 ;DOI: 10.3386/w25956

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Title:
Surveying Business Uncertainty
Author: Altig, David ; Parker, Nicholas ; Barrero, Jose Maria ; Bloom, Nicholas ; Davis, Steven J ; Meyer, Brent H
Subjects: Capital expenditures ; Central banks ; Consumers ; Corporate Finance ; Decision making ; Economic Fluctuations and Growth ; Economic models ; Employment ; Households ; International finance ; Monetary Economics ; Polls & surveys ; Probability ; Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship ; Sovereign debt
Is Part Of: NBER Working Paper Series, 2019-06, p.25956
Description: We elicit subjective probability distributions from business executives about their own-firm outcomes at a one-year look-ahead horizon. In terms of question design, our key innovation is to let survey respondents freely select support points and probabilities in five-point distributions over future sales growth, employment, and investment. In terms of data collection, we develop and field a new monthly panel Survey of Business Uncertainty. The SBU began in 2014 and now covers about 1,750 firms drawn from all 50 states, every major nonfarm industry, and a range of firm sizes. We find three key results. First, firm-level growth expectations are highly predictive of realized growth rates. Second, subjective uncertainty is highly predictive of forecast errors and the magnitude of future forecast revisions. Third, subjective uncertainty rises with the firm’s absolute growth rate in the previous year and the extent of recent news about its growth prospects. We aggregate over firm-level forecast distributions to construct monthly indices of business expectations (first moment) and uncertainty (second moment) for the U.S. private sector.
Publisher: Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research
Language: English
Identifier: ISSN: 0898-2937
DOI: 10.3386/w25956
Source: Alma/SFX Local Collection
ProQuest Central

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Surveying Business Uncertainty

Copyright National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. Jun 2019 ;ISSN: 0898-2937 ;DOI: 10.3386/w25956

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