Profit margins and firm price growth: evidence from the Decision Maker Panel

Ivan Yotzov, Philip Bunn, Nicholas Bloom, Paul Mizen and Gregory Thwaites

Inflation in 2023 remains elevated across many advanced economies. Existing studies have considered the contribution of profits to persistently high inflation in the US, euro area and UK. To add to this debate, we recently asked firms in the Decision Maker Panel about their profit margins over the past year and their expectations for the year ahead. This post summarises the key findings from these new questions, and links them to recent trends in prices. Firms reported a squeeze in profit margins over the past year, on average, but they expect to rebuild margins over the next year. Firms expecting to increase margins also expect slightly higher price growth, suggesting that margin rebuilding could make some contribution to inflation persistence.

Continue reading →

Firm inflation perceptions and expectations: evidence from the Decision Maker Panel

Ivan Yotzov, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Ozgen Ozturk and Gregory Thwaites

Since late 2021, annual CPI inflation in the UK increased sharply. Alongside this increase, there was also a significant rise in firm and household short-term inflation expectations. In this post, we use data from the Decision Maker Panel (DMP), a UK-wide monthly business survey, to study whether there is an effect of CPI data releases on firms’ current inflation perceptions and year-ahead inflation expectations over the past four years. We find that on average firms’ perceptions of current CPI inflation have been close to the eventual outturn. Furthermore, one-year ahead own-price expectations respond significantly to CPI outturns, with the effects being particularly strong since the start of 2022.

Continue reading →

What matters to firms? New insights from survey text comments

Ivan Yotzov, Nick Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Pawel Smietanka and Greg Thwaites

Text data is often raw and unstructured, and yet it is the key means of human communication. Textual analysis techniques are increasingly being used in economic and financial research in a variety of different ways. In this post we apply these techniques to a new setting: the text comments left by respondents to the Decision Maker Panel (DMP) Survey, a UK-wide monthly business survey. Using over 20,000 comments, we show that: (i) these comments are a rich and unexplored data source, (ii) Brexit has been the dominant topic of comments since 2016, (iii) text-based indices match existing uncertainty measures from the DMP at both the aggregate and firm level, and (iii) sentiment among UK firms has been declining since 2016.

Continue reading →