Testing of Macroeconomic Lying Hypothesis: French Industry Case

Abstract

The research is intended to analyse the problem of informational asymmetry in macroeconomic level. The authors state that individual economic agents (firms) could lie about their economic situation in public surveys, so that their lying could be detected on macroeconomic level. To demonstrate the possibility of such hypothesis the method of simple regression was used. The regression was calculated in clustered data, where the discrepancy between expressed expectations of industrial firms and their immediate acting through the new orders in manufacturing is taken as a criterion to detect the “lying” or “true” statistic periods. The research was made on the basis of French industry's data and revealed that firms could lie in the periods here named as “Lying optimism”. The possibility to detect the “lying” moments on macroeconomic level could be used for the forecast of business cycle turning points, in financial market, as well.