Coordinating Agents' Actions: The Influence of Macroeconomic Information on Firm-Level Expectations.

We analyse individual qualitative answers to business survey questions on current and expected output. We assume that the economic environment entrepreneurs are facing can be decomposed into a common component and an idiosyncratic one. When answering the questionaire, entrepreneurs have information on the past common part of their economic environment through the balances of opinions disseminated in newspapers, which is a prerequisite to an effective coordination of their decisions. We test whether individual answers on expected output are affected by such macroeconomic information.