It is common to analyze the effects of alternative monetary policy commitments under the assumption of fully model-consistent expectations. This implicitly assumes unrealistic cognitive abilities on the part of economic decision makers. The relevant question, however, is not whether the...

We propose a method to measure people's subjective models of the macroeconomy. Using a sample of 2,200 households representative of the US population and a sample of more than 1,000 experts, we measure beliefs about how the unemployment rate and the inflation rate respond to four different...

We provide survey evidence on how households’ inflation expectations matter for their spending highlighting a behavioral distortion compared to the New Keynesian setup. A large share of households expects prices to remain stable instead of increasing. Such a belief is linked to individual...

We study the effects of monetary policy on aggregate consumption combining a heterogeneous agent model with measured expectations under different policy counterfactuals. We express the consumption of non-hand-to-mouth households as a function of expectations only and elicit all expectations...

This paper shows that price rigidity evolves in an economy populated by imperfectly rational agents who experiment with alternative rules of thumb. In the model, firms must set their prices in face of aggregate demand shocks. Their payoff depends on the level of aggregate demand, as well as on...

This paper estimates a Behavioral New Keynesian model to revisit the evidence that passive US monetary policy in the pre-1979 sample led to indeterminate equilibria and sunspot-driven fluctuations, while active policy after 1982, by satisfying the Taylor principle, was instrumental in restoring...

We analyse the determination of taxes on harmful goods when consumers have self-control problems. We show that under reasonable assumptions, the socially optimal corrective tax exceeds the average distortion caused by self-control problems. Further, we analyse how individuals with self-control...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian model with new and old behavioral elements. Agents in the model exhibit cognitive discounting, or myopia: they discount variables far into the future at higher rates than typically implied in the benchmark model. We investigate the model under different...

This paper tests the ability of popular New Keynesian models, which are traditionally used to study monetary policy and business cycles, to match the data regarding a key channel for monetary transmission: the dynamic interactions between macroeconomic variables and their corresponding...

We document five effects of providing individuals with crowdsourced spending information about their peers (individuals with similar characteristics) through a FinTech app. First, users who spend more than their peers reduce their spending significantly, whereas users who spend less keep...