From ‘I don’t like Mondays’ to ‘Friday I’m in love’ – day-of-the-week effects in business surveys

ABSTRACT

This study identifies day-of-the-week effects in business surveys using monthly data from the ifo Institute in Germany. Companies are more likely to exhibit pessimistic business expectations for the upcoming months on Mondays and optimistic expectations towards the end of the week. This pattern also applies to the assessment of the current business situation. Moreover, firms exhibit greater uncertainty regarding their upcoming business development on Mondays, with this uncertainty decreasing by Saturday. These effects are primarily observed in firms from the service sector and companies with fewer than 50 employees. Although the effects are statistically significant, they are, from an economic standpoint, rather minor.

KEYWORDS:

• Day-of-the-week effect
• ifo business survey
• answering behaviour
• expectations
• uncertainty

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D84
• E32
• D91

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Andreas Peichl, Manuel Menkhoff, and two referees for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data can be accessed at the data centre of the ifo institute (EBDC).

Notes

¹ The results remain qualitatively the same when employing an ordinal regression model or defining a dummy representing negative answers.

² The results remain qualitatively the same when using Wednesday or Thursday instead of Tuesday as reference day.

³ Interestingly, for large firms, we note a stark contrast to the lower uncertainty typically observed on Saturdays, with a significant 172.8% increase in the likelihood of ‘high’ uncertainty being reported. This anomaly could stem from a data fragment, given the small sample size of only 74 observations in this category.