IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/kud/kucebi/1911.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Subjective Models Of The Macroeconomy: Evidence From Experts And A Representative Sample

Author

Listed:
  • Peter Andre

    (University of Bonn)

  • Carlo Pizzinelli

    (IMF)

  • Christopher Roth

    (Department of Economics, University of Warwick)

  • Johannes Wohlfart

    (CEBI, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen)

Abstract

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 aggregate unemployment and in ation respond to different macroeconomic shocks. Expert predictions are quantitatively close to standard DSGE models and VAR evidence. While households' beliefs are directionally aligned with those of experts in the case of oil supply shocks and government spending shocks, they predict an opposite reaction of in ation to monetary policy and income tax shocks. A substantial fraction of deviations of household predictions can be explained by the use of a simple affective heuristic.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter Andre & Carlo Pizzinelli & Christopher Roth & Johannes Wohlfart, 2019. "Subjective Models Of The Macroeconomy: Evidence From Experts And A Representative Sample," CEBI working paper series 19-11, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI).
    • Handle: RePEc:kud:kucebi:1911
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econ.ku.dk/cebi/publikationer/working-papers/CEBI_WP-11-19.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Reis, Ricardo, 2006. "Inattentive consumers," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(8), pages 1761-1800, November.
    2. Alan S. Blinder & Michael Ehrmann & Marcel Fratzscher & Jakob De Haan & David-Jan Jansen, 2008. "Central Bank Communication and Monetary Policy: A Survey of Theory and Evidence," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 46(4), pages 910-945, December.
    3. Jonathan de Quidt & Johannes Haushofer & Christopher Roth, 2018. "Measuring and Bounding Experimenter Demand," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(11), pages 3266-3302, November.
    4. Uhlig, Harald, 2005. "What are the effects of monetary policy on output? Results from an agnostic identification procedure," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(2), pages 381-419, March.
    5. Andreas Fuster & Benjamin Hebert & David Laibson, 2012. "Natural Expectations, Macroeconomic Dynamics, and Asset Pricing," NBER Macroeconomics Annual, University of Chicago Press, vol. 26(1), pages 1-48.
    6. Bartosz Maćkowiak & Mirko Wiederholt, 2015. "Business Cycle Dynamics under Rational Inattention," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 82(4), pages 1502-1532.
    7. Boumans Dorine & Garnitz Johanna, 2017. "Ifo World Economic Survey Database – An International Economic Expert Survey," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 237(1), pages 71-80, February.
    8. Theresa Kuchler & Basit Zafar, 2019. "Personal Experiences and Expectations about Aggregate Outcomes," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 74(5), pages 2491-2542, October.
    9. Frank Smets & Rafael Wouters, 2007. "Shocks and Frictions in US Business Cycles: A Bayesian DSGE Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(3), pages 586-606, June.
    10. Coibion, Olivier & Gorodnichenko, Yuriy & Kumar, Saten & Pedemonte, Mathieu, 2020. "Inflation expectations as a policy tool?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(C).
    11. Arias, Jonas E. & Caldara, Dario & Rubio-Ramírez, Juan F., 2019. "The systematic component of monetary policy in SVARs: An agnostic identification procedure," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 1-13.
    12. Michael Bailey & Eduardo Dávila & Theresa Kuchler & Johannes Stroebel, 2019. "House Price Beliefs And Mortgage Leverage Choice," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 86(6), pages 2403-2452.
    13. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Tiziano Ropele, 2020. "Inflation Expectations and Firm Decisions: New Causal Evidence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 135(1), pages 165-219.
    14. Milani, Fabio, 2007. "Expectations, learning and macroeconomic persistence," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(7), pages 2065-2082, October.
    15. Alan S. Blinder & Michael Ehrmann & Marcel Fratzscher & Jakob De Haan & David-Jan Jansen, 2008. "Central Bank Communication and Monetary Policy: A Survey of Theory and Evidence," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 46(4), pages 910-945, December.
    16. Emmanuel Farhi & Iván Werning, 2019. "Monetary Policy, Bounded Rationality, and Incomplete Markets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 109(11), pages 3887-3928, November.
    17. Rupal Kamdar, 2019. "The Inattentive Consumer: Sentiment and Expectations," 2019 Meeting Papers 647, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    18. Sreyoshi Das & Camelia M Kuhnen & Stefan Nagel, 2020. "Socioeconomic Status and Macroeconomic Expectations," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 33(1), pages 395-432.
    19. Carvalho, Carlos & Nechio, Fernanda, 2014. "Do people understand monetary policy?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 108-123.
    20. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Michael Weber & Michael Weber, 2019. "Monetary Policy Communications and their Effects on Household Inflation Expectations," CESifo Working Paper Series 7464, CESifo.
    21. Carola Binder & Alex Rodrigue, 2018. "Household Informedness and Long‐Run Inflation Expectations: Experimental Evidence," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 85(2), pages 580-598, October.
    22. repec:pri:cepsud:161blinder is not listed on IDEAS
    23. Andreas Fuster & Greg Kaplan & Basit Zafar, 2018. "What would you do with $500? Spending responses to gains, losses, news, and loans," Staff Reports 843, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Olivier Coibion & Dimitris Georgarakos & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Michael Weber, 2020. "Forward Guidance and Household Expectations," NBER Working Papers 26778, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Haaland, Ingar & Roth, Christopher & Wohlfart. Johannes, 2020. "Designing Information Provision Experiments," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 1275, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    3. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Michael Weber & Michael Weber, 2019. "Monetary Policy Communications and their Effects on Household Inflation Expectations," CESifo Working Paper Series 7464, CESifo.
    4. Francesco D'Acunto & Daniel Hoang & Maritta Paloviita & Michael Weber, 2020. "Effective Policy Communication: Targets versus Instruments," Working Papers 2020-148, Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics.
    5. Goldfayn-Frank, Olga & Wohlfart, Johannes, 2020. "Expectation formation in a new environment: Evidence from the German reunification," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 301-320.
    6. Christian Conrad & Zeno Enders & Alexander Glas, 2020. "The Role of Information and Experience for Households' Inflation Expectations," CESifo Working Paper Series 8528, CESifo.
    7. Coibion, Olivier & Gorodnichenko, Yuriy & Weber, Michael, 2020. "Does Policy Communication during COVID-19 Work?," IZA Discussion Papers 13355, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Egor Starkov, 2020. "Only Time Will Tell: Credible Dynamic Signaling," Papers 2007.09568, arXiv.org.
    9. Bernardo Candia & Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2020. "Communication and the Beliefs of Economic Agents," NBER Working Papers 27800, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Michael Weber & Michael Weber, 2020. "Does Policy Communication During Covid Work?," CESifo Working Paper Series 8369, CESifo.
    11. Laudenbach, Christine & Loos, Benjamin & Pirschel, Jenny & Wohlfart, Johannes, 2020. "The trading response of individual investors to local bankruptcies," SAFE Working Paper Series 272, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    12. Christine Laudenbach & Benjamin Loos & Jenny Pirschel & Johannes Wohlfart, 2020. "The Trading Response of Individual Investors to Local Bankruptcies," CESifo Working Paper Series 8191, CESifo.
    13. Arnemann, Laura & Konrad, Kai A. & Potrafke, Niklas, 2021. "Collective Memories on the 2010 European Debt Crisis ," CEPR Discussion Papers 15683, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lamla, Michael J. & Vinogradov, Dmitri V., 2019. "Central bank announcements: Big news for little people?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(C), pages 21-38.
    2. Bernardo Candia & Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 2020. "Communication and the Beliefs of Economic Agents," NBER Working Papers 27800, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Coibion, Olivier & Gorodnichenko, Yuriy & Kumar, Saten & Pedemonte, Mathieu, 2020. "Inflation expectations as a policy tool?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(C).
    4. D'Acunto, Francesco & Hoang, Daniel & Paloviita, Maritta & Weber, Michael, 2020. "Effective Policy Communication : Targets versus Instruments," Research Discussion Papers 17/2020, Bank of Finland.
    5. Francesco D'Acunto & Daniel Hoang & Maritta Paloviita & Michael Weber, 2020. "Effective Policy Communication: Targets versus Instruments," Working Papers 2020-148, Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics.
    6. Olivier Coibion & Dimitris Georgarakos & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Michael Weber, 2020. "Forward Guidance and Household Expectations," Working Papers 2020-07, Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics.
    7. Oleksiy Kryvtsov & Luba Petersen, 2019. "Central Bank Communication That Works: Lessons from Lab Experiments," Staff Working Papers 19-21, Bank of Canada.
    8. Haldane, Andrew & Macaulay, Alistair & McMahon, Michael, 2020. "The 3 E’s of central bank communication with the public," Bank of England working papers 847, Bank of England.
    9. Martin Geiger & Johann Scharler, 2018. "How do people interpret macroeconomic shocks? Evidence from U.S. survey data," Working Papers 2018-12, Faculty of Economics and Statistics, University of Innsbruck.
    10. Olivier Coibion & Dimitris Georgarakos & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Maarten van Rooij, 2019. "How does consumption respond to news about inflation? Field evidence from a randomized control trial," DNB Working Papers 651, Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department.
    11. Fabio Milani & John Treadwell, 2012. "The Effects of Monetary Policy “News” and “Surprises”," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 44(8), pages 1667-1692, December.
    12. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Michael Weber & Michael Weber, 2019. "Monetary Policy Communications and their Effects on Household Inflation Expectations," CESifo Working Paper Series 7464, CESifo.
    13. Silvia Miranda-Agrippino & Giovanni Ricco, 2015. "The Transmission of Monetary Policy Shocks," Discussion Papers 1711, Centre for Macroeconomics (CFM), revised Feb 2017.
    14. Dovern, Jonas & Müller, Lena Sophia & Wohlrabe, Klaus, 2020. "How Do Firms Form Expectations of Aggregate Growth? New Evidence from a Large-scale Business Survey," Working Papers 15, German Research Foundation's Priority Programme 1859 "Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour", Humboldt University Berlin.
    15. Christopher Roth & Johannes Wohlfart, 2020. "How Do Expectations about the Macroeconomy Affect Personal Expectations and Behavior?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(4), pages 731-748, October.
    16. Christopher Roth & Sonja Settele & Johannes Wohlfart, 2020. "Risk Exposure and Acquisition of Macroeconomic Information," CESifo Working Paper Series 8634, CESifo.
    17. Daniel J. Lewis & Christos Makridis & Karel Mertens, 2019. "Do Monetary Policy Announcements Shift Household Expectations?," Working Papers 1906, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, revised 17 Jan 2020.
    18. Ingar Haaland & Christopher Roth & Johannes Wohlfart, 2020. "Designing Information Provision Experiments," CEBI working paper series 20-20, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI).
    19. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Tiziano Ropele, 2020. "Inflation Expectations and Firm Decisions: New Causal Evidence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 135(1), pages 165-219.
    20. Bholat, David & Broughton, Nida & Ter Meer, Janna & Walczak, Eryk, 2019. "Enhancing central bank communications using simple and relatable information," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(C), pages 1-15.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Expectation Formation; Subjective Models; Heuristics; Macroeconomic Shocks; Monetary Policy; Fiscal Policy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • D84 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Expectations; Speculations
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E71 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on the Macro Economy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:kud:kucebi:1911. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Therese Moeller). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/cebkudk.html .

    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.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.