Qualitative interviews are one of the fundamental tools of empirical social science research and give individuals the opportunity to explain how they understand and interpret the world, allowing researchers to capture detailed and nuanced insights into complex phenomena. However, qualitative...

We study response behavior in surveys and show how the explanatory power of self-reports can be improved. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that the respondent has imperfect self-knowledge about her individual characteristics. In panel data, the...

This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new survey panel on German manufacturing firms, we show that uncertainty reflects change: Planning incorporates higher subjective uncertainty about future sales growth when the firm has just experienced unusual growth, and more so if...

The ifo Institute for Economic Research has been conducting the ifo business survey since its foundation in 1949. To ensure stability of participation rates, regular sample recruitment is indispensable. Does the dispatch method matter for response rates of a recruiting campaign? To answer this...

FamData is a database covering family businesses and non-family businesses across various size classes and branches containing structural and financial information. The ifo Institute assembled a business panel with executives from almost 4,000 companies. In addition to the "hard" business data...

We adopt the Jackknife Model Averaging (JMA) technique to conduct a meta-regression analysis of 925 renminbi (RMB) misalignment estimates generated by 69 studies. The JMA method accounts for model selection and sampling uncertainties, and allows for non-nested model specifications and...

Recent surveys of the literature on climate change and migration emphasize the important diversity of outcomes and approaches of the empirical studies. In this paper, we conduct a meta-analysis in order to investigate the role of the methodological choices of these empirical studies in finding...

We provide the first quantitative synthesis of the literature on how financial markets react to the disclosure of financial crimes committed by listed firms. While consensus expects negative stock price returns, the exact size of the effect is far from clear. We survey 111 studies published over...

A large literature studies subjective beliefs about economic facts using unincentivized survey questions. We devise randomized experiments in a representative online survey to investigate whether incentivizing belief accuracy affects stated beliefs about average earnings by professional degree...