Households often struggle to understand policy interventions, limiting the effectiveness of policy transmission. We study how economic policy signals reach and influence households, focusing on the role of professional economists as interpretive intermediaries. When policy signals are complex...

Using survey data from Austrian households, this paper examines how personality traits influence households' inflation expectations. We measure the Big Five personality traits and show they explain 70 % more of the differences in expectations than sociodemographic factors like age and income...

Professional inflation forecasts contain valuable information but exhibit information frictions. We extract improved forecasts by explicitly modeling these frictions using the US Survey of Professional Forecasters data, and find that forecast rigidity increases systematically with horizon,...

This paper studies the response of inflation expectations to an exogenous shift in central bank preferences. We use the unexpected announcement of the resignation of Jens Weidmann, the president of the Deutsche Bundesbank, in 2021 as a natural experiment constituting a rare case of an exogenous...

This paper examines the persistent upward bias in euro area households' inflation perceptions and expectations, even when realized inflation is near the ECB's target. It discusses behavioural and informational drivers of this bias, its implications for consumption, wage setting, and monetary...

We study how consumers form and revise inflation expectations using a unique, highly balanced monthly panel of Dutch households. We develop a Bayesian framework that nests Full-Information Rational Expectations (FIRE) alongside common forecasting heuristics and test it by recovering...

We measure which economic topics are top of mind using quarterly German household and firm panels from 2020 to 2024, a period that spans the post-pandemic inflation surge and the subsequent disinflation. With these data, we study the determinants and consequences of having inflation top of mind....

Central bank surveys frequently elicit households’ probabilistic beliefs about future inflation by employing response scales centered around zero inflation. Analyzing data from the high-inflation period of 2022/2023, we demonstrate how this practice leads to distortions in households'...

We document novel stylized facts regarding updating of households’ inflation expectations. Using two randomized controlled trials fielded in the US and Germany where signals in the form of professionals’ inflation forecasts have different perceived levels of precision, we show that...

This work highlights a previously overlooked factor that contributes to bias in private inflation forecasts-ignorance of confidential monetary rules. Additionally, it examines how this ignorance indirectly affects policy rate settings. The model proposed reconciles biases in two key forecast...

This paper introduces a novel TV news index specifically designed to track coverage of rising inflation across major US TV channels: ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News. The index is generated daily and aggregated into a monthly measure. Using this index, we analyze the impact of TV news on inflation...

To estimate the impact of disagreement about expected inflation on the transmission of monetary policy in the Czech Republic, this article makes three novel contributions to the literature. First, we reconstruct a series of inflation expectations and calculate their disagreement from qualitative...

This paper looks at household inflation attention in the euro area, using the European Commission's Business and Consumer Survey. The main contributions are to measure inflation inattention and its drivers and to illustrate how inflation inattention differs across socio-economic categories...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of a belief distortion shock—defined as the unexpected component of household inflation expectations after accounting for professional forecasts and observable fundamentals. Using survey data, U.S. macroeconomic variables, and machine-learning...

We conducted a survey of Turkish firms, using randomized treatments to provide varied information about inflation in a high-inflation environment. By matching the survey data with administrative firm-level data on employment, sales, credit, and foreign exchange transactions, we explore the...

This paper investigates how subjective household inflation uncertainty around future prices shapes employed individuals’ expectations of nominal wage growth. Utilizing detailed microdata from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE), we document two key...

This paper investigates how the ECB's monetary policy affects consumers' perceptions about the credibility of the inflation target. Monetary policy is assessed by the gap between the actual policy rate and a Taylor rate to approximate the interest rate expected by the public. Drawing on survey...

This paper investigates how global uncertainty and macro-financial shocks transmitted to BRICS+ equity markets between April 2016 and July 2025. A vector autoregressive (VAR) framework, complemented by Granger-causality tests, variance decompositions, and impulse response functions, is employed...