Beyond the Business Climate: Supplementary Questions in the ifo Business Survey

Abstract

In the monthly ifo Business Survey, around 9000 companies answer questions about their current business situation, expectations, and plans for the near future as well as on other business variables. Beyond the regular questions, ifo has also the possibility to include supplementary questions into the survey. These questions may be prompted by the intention to obtain an ad hoc picture of the effects of certain developments in economic policy on the companies and their reactions to them (e.g. the Covid-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine). Another reason is the collection of data for research projects. This article gives an overview of all supplementary questions since 2009 through May 2022. It intends to show examples of the use of the obtained data and can be used as a guide for future research projects. Researchers can work with the firm-level microdata of supplementary and regular survey questions at the LMU-ifo Economics & Business Data Center.

Who Reports the Mood in German Boardrooms? Evidence from the Ifo Business Survey

“…In the ifo Business Survey around 9,000 companies from almost all economic sectors throughout Germany are surveyed monthly on their current business situation, expectations and plans for the coming months, as well as on further variables of interest (Demmelhuber, Sauer, and Wohlrabe, 2023). In addition to numerous other economic indicators, the main result from this survey is the ifo Business Climate Index for Germany (Sauer and Wohlrabe, 2018).…”