This paper provides survey evidence on firms’ subjective uncertainty about future sales growth from a new … representative panel data set of the German manufacturing sector. The main finding is that uncertainty reflects change: firms report … more subjective uncertainty after either high or low growth realizations. In the cross section of firms, subjective …

We survey samples of German firms and households to document novel stylized facts about the extent of information … frictions among the two groups. First, firms' expectations about macroeconomic variables are closer to expert forecasts and less … the distance from expert forecasts varies more across groups of households than across groups of firms. Third, firms …

We survey samples of German firms and households to document novel stylized facts about the extent of information … frictions among the two groups. First, firms' expectations about macroeconomic variables are closer to expert forecasts and less … the distance from expert forecasts varies more across groups of households than across groups of firms. Third, firms …

We leverage survey data from Germany, Italy, and the US to document several novel stylized facts about the extent of … information frictions among firms and households. First, firms' expectations about the central bank policy rate, inflation, and … substantially more heterogeneity in information frictions within households than within firms. Third, consistent with firms having …

We use surveys of German households and firms to study the extent of information frictions among different groups of … economic agents. Firms' expectations about the central bank policy rate, inflation, and aggregate unemployment are more aligned … with expert forecasts and less dispersed than households'. Moreover, firms update their policy rate expectations …

This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new survey panel on German manufacturing firms, we show … past growth. In the cross section of firms, however, subjective uncertainty differs from conditional volatility: planning … in successful firms—either large or fast-growing—reflects lower subjective uncertainty than in unsuccessful firms even …

We leverage survey data from Germany, Italy, and the US to document several novel stylized facts about the extent of … information frictions among firms and households. First, firms’ expectations about the central bank policy rate, inflation, and … substantially more heterogeneity in information frictions within households than within firms. Third, consistent with firms having …

We develop a model of firm learning in volatile markets with noisy signals and test its predictions using historical … German data. Firms’ forecasts improve with age. We exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment where firms in the … East are treated with ignorance about the distribution of market states. As theoretically predicted, Eastern firms forecast …

This paper presents new evidence on the expectation formation process of firms from a survey of the German … economic sentiment index and which is an important determinant of their employment and investment decisions. We find that firms … extrapolate their experience too much and make predictable forecasting errors. Moreover, firms do not seem to anticipate the …