Business tendency surveys are a commonly accepted instrument for the assessment ofthe current business cycle course. Most of these surveys rely on qualitative questionsabout the current situation of the firms and about heir expectations for the next months. This paper analyzes whether qualitative questions about employment expectations are useful to assess actual employment changes. In Germany the Ifo Institute is specialized on business surveys. The German Ifo data are investigated using three different approaches: Smoothing techniques help to date turning points in the course of the series. Error correction models are used to analyze the general lead/lag relations and Probit models are used to estimate a threshold for the survey based indicator which helps to differentiate between an increase and an decrease in employment. All three methods indicate that the employment expectations form a leading indicator of actual employment changes.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich in its series Ifo Working Paper Series with number
Ifo Working Paper No. 11.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C20 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - General C40 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - General
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)