The recent nonexperimental literature on social learning focuses on showing that observational learning exists, that is, individuals do indeed draw inferences by observing the actions of others. We take this literature a step further by analyzing whether individuals are Bayesian social learners....

Understanding the formation of consumer inflation expectations is considered crucial for managing monetary policy. This paper investigates how consumers form and update their inflation expectations using a unique "information" experiment embedded in a survey. We first elicit respondents'...

This report presents an overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations, a new monthly online survey of a rotating panel of household heads. The survey collects timely information on consumers' expectations and decisions on a broad variety of topics, including but not limited to inflation,...

We use novel survey data to estimate how personal experiences affect household expectations about aggregate economic outcomes in housing and labor markets. We exploit variation in locally experienced house prices to show that individuals systematically extrapolate from recent locally experienced...

We propose a new, computationally-efficient way to approximate the "grouped fixed-effects" (GFE) estimator of Bonhomme and Manresa (2015), which estimates grouped patterns of unobserved heterogeneity. To do so, we generalize the fuzzy C-means objective to regression settings. As the...

This paper analyzes the impact of unanticipated changes in the federal funds rate target on equity prices, with the aim of both estimating the size of the typical reaction and understanding the reasons for the market's response. We find that over the June 1989-December 2002 sample period, a...

This paper examines how risk in trading activity can affect the volatility of asset prices. We look for this relationship in the behavior of interest rate swap spreads and in the volume and interest rates of repurchase contracts. Specifically, we focus on convergence trading, in which...

Focusing on capital asset returns governed by a factor structure, the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) is a one-period model, in which preclusion of arbitrage over static portfolios of these assets leads to a linear relation between the expected return and its covariance with the factors. The APT,...

Does the presence of arbitrageurs decrease equilibrium asset price volatility? I study an economy with arbitrageurs, informed investors, and noise traders. Arbitrageurs face a trade-off between arbitrage and inference: they would like to buy assets in response to temporary price declines (the...

We examine the implications of time variation in the correlation between the equity premium and nondurable consumption growth for equity return dynamics in G-7 countries. Using a VAR-GARCH (1,1) model, we find that the correlation increases with recession indicators such as above-average...