Jose Maria Barrero

Survey of Business Uncertainty

Using surveys of business managers, Jose Maria Barrero studies how these surveys forecast future own-firm outcomes such as sales, employment, and working arrangements. A key part of this agenda revolves around eliciting subjective probability distributions. In a paper with Altig et al. (2022, Journal of Econometrics) the researchers test and develop the survey methodology for eliciting such distributions, resulting in the Survey of Business Uncertainty run by the Atlanta Fed. In a solo-authored paper (Barrero 2022 Journal of Financial Economics) he describes key properties of managerial forecasts and uses a dynamic equilibrium model to quantify the cost of departures from rational expectations. One key result is that overprecision (managers’ tendency to understate the variance of shocks to firm cash flows) is more severe and therefore more costly than short-term overreaction to cash flow shocks.

Mr. Barrero is an applied economist with interests in finance, macro, and labor economics. While at CESifo he hopes to engage with researchers who work with the ifo Institute’s extensive set of business surveys as well as applied researchers working on big trends related to labor markets, including the recent shift to working from home. Together with Nick Bloom (Stanford University) and Steven J. Davis he is a co-founder of WFH Research, a project that studies the big shift to working from home after 2020 and its consequences for workers, managers, and the macroeconomy. They run the monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA) in the US and the annual Global Survey of Working Arrangements that also includes ifo Senior Economist Mathias Dolls, as well as Cevat Giray Aksoy (King’s College London and EBRD) and Pablo Zárate (Stanford University). While at CESifo Mr. Barrero hopes to update the empirical analyses in his working paper on “Why Working From Home Will Stick” (Barrero et al., 2021) using SWAA data, and quantify the impact of remote work on aggregate output and productivity using a simple equilibrium model.

Jose Maria Barrero is an Assistant Professor of Finance at ITAM (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México) Business School in Mexico City. He obtained his PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 2019 and a BA in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013.