Beyond the Business Climate: Regular and Supplementary Questions in the ifo Business Survey

In the monthly ifo Business Survey around 9,000 German companies answer questions about their current business situation, expectations and plans for the near future as well as on other business variables. This paper provides an overview of all regular questions (monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, annually). Furthermore, a special focus lies on detailed information about all supplementary questions since 2009. This overview can be used as a guide for future research projects. The ifo Institute provides the data via two channels: On one side, researchers can work with the firm-level microdata of all survey questions at the LMU-ifo Economics & Business Data Center (EBDC). On the other side, data sets of aggregated time-series for all regularly surveyed variables can be obtained from the ifo Center for Macroeconomics and Surveys.