Fiscal Beliefs & Narratives

We conduct an experiment with educational content within a large-scale household survey on monetary finance. We identify prior narratives that respondents assign to this concept using open-ended questions analyzed with a large language model. Prior narratives are dominated by inflation concerns and ‘magic money’ views, with little reference to taxation. A central bank (CB) educational blogpost preceded by a short video clip on public finance robustly reduces support for monetary financing and shifts a broad set of related fiscal beliefs, including inflation concerns associated to this policy, support for fiscal discipline, and CB independence. These spillovers do not primarily operate through causal economic reasoning but may be suggestive of a broad application of a ‘fiscal seriousness’ mental model. Our findings indicate that CB communication can tackle even complex topics when it combines educational content with salient narrative framing that connects to existing beliefs.