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Working Paper
Surveying Business Uncertainty
We elicit subjective probability distributions from business executives about their own-firm outcomes at a one-year look-ahead horizon. In terms of question design, our key innovation is to let survey respondents freely select support points and probabilities in five-point distributions over future sales growth, employment, and investment. In terms of data collection, we develop and field a new monthly panel Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU). The SBU began in 2014 and now covers about 1,750 firms drawn from all 50 states, every major nonfarm industry, and a range of firm sizes. We find ...
Working Paper
The Monetization of Innovation
We develop a dynamic model for digital service firms, which invest in monetization to generate revenues from services provided to customers for free. Our model captures and explains why such firms often build a large customer base and become highly valued while continuing to suffer losses—traditional models would struggle to explain this pattern. Counterfactual analysis reveals that monetization uncertainty slows technological advancement by diverting resources away from innovation. We also show that regulation aimed at protecting user privacy has sizable adverse effect on firm size and the ...
Working Paper
Creativity and economic growth: theory, measures, and potentials for morocco
The current era of globalization is dominated by the rise of investments in intangible capital rather than tangible capital ? the ascendance of creativity over plant and equipment. This brief paper is motivated by the possibility that emerging market economies such as Morocco might take greater advantage of new tools and policies designed for this new era. To begin, I discuss the transformation of the global economy and the consequences of the transformed global economy for economic thinking and measurement. I refer to both old and new literature on the measurement of intangible investment ...
Working Paper
Pandemic-Era Uncertainty on Main Street and Wall Street
We draw on the monthly Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) to make three observations about pandemic-era uncertainty in the U.S. economy. First, equity market traders and executives of nonfinancial firms share similar assessments about uncertainty at one-year lookahead horizons. That is, the one-year VIX has moved similarly to our survey-based measure of (average) firm-level subjective uncertainty at one-year forecast horizons. Second, looking within the distribution of beliefs in the SBU reveals that firm-level expectations shifted towards upside risk in the latter part of 2020. In this ...
Working Paper
Innovation, investor sentiment, and firm-level experimentation
Due to frictions like informational externalities, firms invest too little in learning the productivity of newly available technologies through small-scale experimentation. I study the effect of investor sentiment on the relation between technological innovation and future firm-level R&D expenses, which include the resources used for small-scale experimentation. I find that rapidly improving investor sentiment strengthens the effect of technological innovation on one-year-ahead R&D expenses, and that the effect is more pronounced for high-tech firms with tighter financing constraints. The ...