Determinants of Subjective Uncertainty at the Company Level

Since the beginning of 2013, the ifo Institute has been asking the manufacturing companies that participate in the ifo Business Surveys about future scenarios for their sales in the next quarter and deriving various expectation variables from this. One of these variables – the difference between best-case and worst-case sales growth – can be interpreted as a measure of subjective entrepreneurial uncertainty. It turns out that uncertainty increases in times of change, even if this change was expected.