"The business surveys of the ifo Institute (short for ""Information und Forschung"") are internationally renowned. Every month close to 7,000 enterprises are questioned on their short-term planning and their appraisals of the actual and future business situation. The confidence indicator...

This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new survey panel on German manufacturing firms, we show that uncertainty reflects change: Planning incorporates higher subjective uncertainty about future sales growth when the firm has just experienced unusual growth, and more so if...

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...