EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Comparing survey measures of firms’ expectations and uncertainty

Marco Bottone ()
Additional contact information
Marco Bottone: Statistics and Research - Statistical Analysis Directorate

Empirical Economics, 2025, vol. 69, issue 1, No 11, 393-430

Abstract: Abstract I analyze and compare firms’ expectations and uncertainty using both point forecasts and subjective probability distributions, drawing on data from the 2017 Bank of Italy survey of industrial and service firms. I find that, on average, point forecasts are better predictors of future sales than the mean of probability forecasts, which in some cases suffer from firms’ difficulty in correctly eliciting subjective distributions. I also find that different measures of uncertainty lead to significant differences in how firms are ranked from most to least uncertain. Finally, I assess the implications of using various uncertainty measures by examining their heterogeneous impact on investment decisions.

Keywords: Probabilistic questions; Firms’ subjective probabilities; Survey methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00181-025-02725-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:empeco:v:69:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s00181-025-02725-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-025-02725-0

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-08-01
Handle: RePEc:spr:empeco:v:69:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s00181-025-02725-0