The paper investigates investment decisions by using a new source of data, that is the OBI annual survey on firms. The main focus of our analysis mainly is the influence of credit market conditions on investment decisions and we find that the main obstacle to the investment is the level of...

During 2002, the discrepancy between the official inflation rate and that perceived by consumers picked up to an all time record in the Eurozone. A measure of this misperception is provided by the results of the monthly qualitative consumer surveys carried out by the European Commission. Of...

Inflation is currently low and falling in the OECD area. A side effect of these facts is that they made harder the task of price index compilers. First of all, researchers and analysts are moving their attention from aggregate price dynamics to price differentials (among products, markets,...

In general, rational economic agents trade off the cost of waiting for the statistical agencies disseminate the final results of the relevant surveys before making a decision, on the one hand, and of making use of some model based predictions. Thus, from the viewpoint of agents, predictions and...

Economic agents are aware to incur in a loss basing their decisions on their own extrapolations instead of sound statistical data, but the loss could be smaller than the one related to waiting for the dissemination of final data. A broad guidance in deciding when statistical offices should...

Typically, firms change their size through a row of discrete leaps over time. A very basic model allowing for discontinuous growth can be based on a couple of assumptions: (a) in the short run, the firm’s equipment and organization provide the maximum profit only for a given production level,...

The paper reviews the different concepts regarding inflation, highlighting some related consequences in refining the actual CPI. It also presents the concept and relevance of public understanding and “perception” of inflation, and discusses a comparison between COLI and COGI and the possible...

The Banks&Businesses Regional Observatory on Economy and Finance (OBI) and the University of Tirana carried on the first qualitative survey on Albanian enterprises between July and September 2008. The main advantages of qualitative surveys are that they are able to catch the “business...

The paper compares different procedures to convert in ordinary quantitative indicators the results of qualitative tendency surveys. The main result is that different procedures tend to produce quantitative indicators with a very similar dynamics. A new quantification method based on the...

The concept of inflation perceived by consumers came in the recent debate on inflation since it may affect consumer behaviour even if the perception was completely wrong. A misperception of inflation occurs particularly when households tend to label incorrectly inflation what really is a...