Agenda

Relatore: Giovanna Notarnicola, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
 

Abstract
Firms expectations and uncertainty about future growth rate of real sales are some main drivers of firm-level decisions concerning investment, employment and capacity utilization. Nevertheless, in the empirical literature, there is no evidence of how firms create expectations and, moreover there is no general consensus on how to estimate uncertainty. Exploiting the rich information contained in the INVIND data set, a survey on manufacturing Italian firms collected yearly by the Bank of Italy, this paper goes in the direction to enrich this stream of literature. Precisely, the contribution of this paper is threefold: first, we present some stylized fact about firm expectations' formation process and uncertainty relying on self-reported data; second, we propose two measures of firm-varying and time-varying uncertainty based of the concept of forecast error and built on the basis of the previous evidences; third, we construct micro-founded macro uncertainty measures and we compare them with the standard measures used in the literature.