Euro Area Business Confidence and Covid-19

Gene Ambrocio

No 4/2021, Research Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland

Abstract: I study the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on business confidence in 11 Euro area countries and its consequent impact on economic activity. To obtain causal effects, I instrument business confidence with domestic household confidence as well as average household confidence in neighboring countries. I find evidence suggesting that the confidence and expectations channel was an important component to the economic transmission of Covid-19. A one standard deviation drop in business confidence leads to between 5-6 and 9 percent fall in economic activity in the industrial and wholesale and retail trade sectors respectively. These results highlight the importance of managing confidence and expectations in crises episodes.

JEL-codes: E23 E66 E71 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://helda.helsinki.fi/bof/bitstream/123456789/17898/1/BoF_DP_202104.pdf (application/pdf)

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:bof:bofrdp:2021_004

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Discussion Papers from Bank of Finland Bank of Finland, P.O. Box 160, FI-00101 Helsinki, Finland. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Minna Nyman ().