IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jeurec/v24y2026i1p58-81..html

Schumpeter Lecture 2025: The New Causal Macroeconomics of Surveys and Experiments

Author

Listed:
  • Olivier Coibion
  • Yuriy Gorodnichenko

Abstract

We discuss how randomized control trials (RCTs) can be used to study the causal effects of expectations on the decisions of households, firms, and other economic agents. Specifically, information provision in RCTs can create exogenous variation in the beliefs of survey participants and thus can address a key identification challenge that has plagued research efforts focused on understanding the role of expectations in shaping economic decisions. When linked to either external information on their actions or subsequent survey waves that measure their ex-post decisions, RCTs can provide clear causal identification of the passthrough from expectations to decisions. We review recent evidence using this strategy and discuss potential challenges associated with this approach.

Suggested Citation

  • Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2026. "Schumpeter Lecture 2025: The New Causal Macroeconomics of Surveys and Experiments," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 24(1), pages 58-81.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jeurec:v:24:y:2026:i:1:p:58-81.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeea/jvaf050
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jeurec:v:24:y:2026:i:1:p:58-81.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jeea .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.