Business Tendency Surveys A Handbook

This handbook is a practical manual on the design and implementation of business tendency surveys, which ask company managers about the current situation of their business and about their plans and expectations for the future.

The Handbook on Economic Tendency Surveys provides best practices and harmonized principles on how to conduct economic tendency survey from sample selection, questionnaire design, survey questions, survey execution, to data processing and dissemination. It also provides examples of uses of these surveys, for example, for composite tendency indicators. These surveys provide qualitative information that cannot be collected using other quantitative statistical methods. They also serve as an integral part of an early warning system because they provide information about the occurrence and timing of upturns and downturns of the economy.

This Handbook aims to provide an overview of regular survey activities, as well as to show how survey results can be used scientifically in the context of business-cycle analysis and forecasting. - Examples of various business surveys are described in detail, starting with their objectives, the questions they pose, how they are weighted and extrapolated and the representativeness of their results. A detailed scientific examination of the explanatory value of the data is also made in order to demonstrate their potential usefulness. The Handbook has three parts: firstly, it presents the importance of business surveys for empirical research. Secondly, selected surveys are introduced in detail such as the Ifo Business Survey and the Ifo Investment Survey, and thirdly, a broad spectrum of studies on the consequence of the survey results is presented. The significance of the surveys applied equally to business cycle analysis and to forecasting. An array of modern methods of time series analysis and econometric model construction is used in these investigations.

The Handbook on Economic Tendency Surveys provides best practices and harmonized principles on how to conduct economic tendency survey from sample selection, questionnaire design, survey questions, survey execution, to data processing and dissemination. It also provides examples of uses of these surveys, for example, for composite tendency indicators. These surveys provide qualitative information that cannot be collected using other quantitative statistical methods. They also serve as an integral part of an early warning system because they provide information about the occurrence and timing of upturns and downturns of the economy.

Handbook of Economic Expectations discusses the state-of-the-art in the collection, study and use of expectations data in economics, including the modelling of expectations formation and updating, as well as open questions and directions for future research. The book spans a broad range of fields, approaches and applications using data on subjective expectations that allows us to make progress on fundamental questions around the formation and updating of expectations by economic agents and their information sets. The information included will help us study heterogeneity and potential biases in expectations and analyze impacts on behavior and decision-making under uncertainty. Combines information about the creation of economic expectations and their theories, applications and likely futures Provides a comprehensive summary of economics expectations literature Explores empirical and theoretical dimensions of expectations and their relevance to a wide array of subfields in economics