Qualitative Business Surveys: Signal or Noise?

This papers identifies the information content at the firm-level of qualitative business survey data by first examining the consistency between these data and the quantitative data provided by the same respondents to the UK's ONS in official surveys. Since the qualitative data are published ahead of the quantitative data the paper then assesses the ability of the qualitative data to predict (or nowcast) the firm-level quantitative data.