Abstract. We study the functioning of a system in the presence of the zero lower bound constraint on the nominal interest rate under the assumption that agents have limited cognitive capabilities. In order to do so, we employ a micro founded heterogeneous expectations New Keynesian model in...

Beliefs are important determinants of an individual's choices and economic outcomes, so understanding how they differ across individuals is of considerable interest. Researchers often rely on surveys that report individual expectations as qualitative data. We propose using a Bayesian...

Using a new consumer survey dataset, we show that macroeconomic preferences affect expectations and economic decisions through different channels. While household expectations are on average inversely related to preferences, households with the same inflation or interest rate expectations can...

Focusing on decisions in health and finance, we collected new data in a general population survey on (i) individual-specific attitudes toward risk, loss and ambiguity and (ii) individual-specific probabilistic beliefs about events related to the decisions we consider. The joint availability of...

Housing decisions depend critically on the supply of long-term rental housing, yet surprisingly few studies examine the determinants of this supply. Based on term structure theories of asset prices and extrapolative beliefs, we hypothesize that housing market conditions shape the term structure...

How do policy communications on future f iscal targets af fect market expectations and beliefs about the future conduct of f iscal policy? In this paper, we develop indicators of f iscal credibility that quantify the degree to which policy announcements anchor expectations, based on the...

Are preferences for reforms driven by individuals’ own endowments or beliefs? To address this question, we conducted a cross-country survey on people’s opinions on employment protection legislation—an area where reform has proven to be difficult and personal interests are at stake. We find...

The equity risk premium is generally considered to be a reward that investors earn on top of the prevailing risk-free return, implying that, all else equal, total expected stock returns should increase with the level of the risk-free return. We examine whether this notion is true using long-term...

The output gap hinges on estimates of potential GDP that can vary widely and are ultimately unobservable. To circumvent these issues, historical surveys of professional forecasters’ nominal GDP projections can be used to construct an “expectations gap,” which shifts the benchmark for...

We set out a behavioural model of the stock market in which investors are connected through a social network. Agents may adopt types on the spectrum from pure fundamentalist to arbitrarily strong chartist which they update from their neighbours depending on past performance. Our main analytical...