The Average Earnings Index
提出一个基于企业调查数据的指标，通过允许阈值随时间变化来量化有序分类的企业调查回答，应用于英国工业联合会数据表明该指标在预测制造业产出增长方面优于传统指标。
Survey data are widely used to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. This paper proposes an indicator based on a theoretically consistent procedure or quantifying firm-level survey responses that are ordered and categorical. Firms' survey responses are assumed to be triggered by a latent continuous random variable as it crosses thresholds. <br/>Breaking tradition these thresholds are not assumed time invariant. An application to firm-level survey data from the Confederation of British Industry shows that the proposed indicator of manufacturing output growth outperforms traditional indicators that assume time-invariant thresholds.