An Analysis of Firms’ Expectations about Activity and Employment

This paper uses individual firm data from the Cyprus Business Surveys for the period May 2009 - April 2011 to assess the extent to which expectations about activity and employment stated in a given month agree with realisations reported by the same firms in subsequent Surveys. The results show that the probability of a firm stating expectations that are consistent with future realisations varies systematically with firm-specific characteristics such as size, district and subsector of operation. The heterogeneity in this probability can be viewed as a description of the shocks experienced ex post by different types of firms