We use a unique design feature of a survey of Italian firms to study the causal effect of inflation expectations on firms' economic decisions. In the survey, a randomly chosen subset of firms is repeatedly treated with information about recent inflation whereas other firms are not. This...

In past years there have been suggestions for monetary policy to engineer higher inflation expectations to stimulate spending. We examine the relationship between the inflation expectations of firms and their investment plans using Italian business survey data over the period 2012-2016. We show...

This paper quantifies the economic costs of distortions in managerial forecasts. We match a unique managerial survey run by the Bank of Italy with administrative data on firm balance sheets and income statements. The resulting dataset allows us to observe a long panel of managerial forecast...