Insights into Business Confidence from Firm-Level Panel Data

Brian Silverstone and James Mitchell

Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato

Abstract: Business confidence announcements attract widespread attention, yet relatively little is known about the series itself. What, for example, does an improvement or deterioration in business confidence mean? We consider this question using a panel of firm-level responses to a business opinion survey that includes a question on business confidence. We relate the confidence responses of the firms to microeconomic and macroeconomic variables that have a direct interpretation and, as a result, determine the variables that firms associate with business confidence. Our analysis of firm-level data reveals that what firms associate with business confidence changes over time and means different things to different firms. Consequently, it is not immediately apparent what a change in business confidence actually means.

Keywords: business confidence; business surveys; polychoric correlation; New Zealand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2005-12-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.its.waikato.ac.nz/wai/econwp/0509.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:wai:econwp:05/09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand, 3240. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Geua Boe-Gibson ().