This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new survey panel on German manufacturing firms, we show … past growth. In the cross section of firms, however, subjective uncertainty differs from conditional volatility: planning … in successful firms—either large or fast-growing—reflects lower subjective uncertainty than in unsuccessful firms even …

We develop a model of firm learning in volatile markets with noisy signals and test its predictions using historical … German data. Firms' forecasts improve with age. We exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment where firms in the … East are treated with ignorance about the distribution of market states. As theoretically predicted, Eastern firms forecast …

COVID-19 hit firms by surprise. In a high frequency, representative panel of German firms, the business outlook …, business perceptions hardly reacted to any other potential source of information: Firms did not learn from foreign policy …

COVID-19 hit firms by surprise. In a high frequency, representative panel of German firms, the business outlook …, business perceptions hardly reacted to any other potential source of information: Firms did not learn from foreign policy …

This paper presents new evidence on the expectation formation process of firms from a survey of the German … economic sentiment index and which is an important determinant of their employment and investment decisions. We find that firms … extrapolate their experience too much and make predictable forecasting errors. Moreover, firms do not seem to anticipate the …

face of the initial inflation shock in reunified Germany. Our findings suggest that large changes in the economic …

face of the initial inflation shock in reunified Germany. Our findings suggest that large changes in the economic …

recession implied by the COVID-19 pandemic. Interestingly, even though inflation rates in Germany have been clearly below 2% for …