Firms’ Expectations and Monetary Policy Shocks in the Eurozone

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of monetary policy shocks on firms’ selling price and production expectations. We estimate a panel structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model for 10 euro-area economies using monthly survey data for the period from 1999:1 to 2018:6. To identify the monetary policy shocks, we use narrative and high frequency instruments taking into account the central bank’s announcements regarding its policy decisions. The impulse responses from a panel SVAR analysis indicate that firms typically revise their expectations in a manner consistent with imperfect information theoretical settings, e.g., increasing their production and selling price expectations after an unanticipated interest rate hike. Interestingly, we observe an overshooting pattern where following the initial surprise that leads imperfectly informed firms to raise (reduce) their production and selling expectations after an unanticipated interest rate hike (M1 expansion), firms gradually come to expect contractionary (expansionary) monetary policy shocks to eventually decrease (increase) production and then inflation, thus revise their expectations accordingly by decreasing (increasing) first their production expectations and then their selling price expectations in accordance with this learning experience over time.