On 3 June 2020, the German government announced a temporary value added tax (VAT) rate reduction. VAT rates were reduced on 1 July 2020 and went back to their previous level on 1 January 2021. We study the price effects of the temporary VAT rate reduction using a web-scraped data set covering...

Using a new consumer survey dataset, we show that macroeconomic preferences affect expectations and economic decisions through different channels. While household expectations are on average inversely related to preferences, households with the same inflation or interest rate expectations can...

In this paper, we explore the degree of anchoring of consumers’ individual long-run inflation expectations utilizing the University of Michigan Survey of Consumer’s rotating panel micro-structure. Our results indicate that long-run inflation expectations became more anchored over the last...

This paper explores communication strategies for anchoring households' medium-term inflation expectations in a high inflation environment. We conducted a survey experiment with a representative sample of 4,000 German households at the height of the recent inflation surge in early 2023, with...

Using a new consumer survey dataset, we show that macroeconomic preferences affect expectations and economic decisions through different channels. While household expectations are on average inversely related to preferences, households with the same inflation or interest rate expectations can...

How do global political shocks influence individuals’ expectations about economic outcomes? We run a unique survey on inflation expectations among 145 tenured economics professors in Germany and exploit the 2022 Russian invasion in Ukraine as a natural experiment to identify the effect of a...

We study the effects of forward-looking communication in an environment of rising inflation rates on German consumers' inflation expectations using a randomized control trial. We show that information about rising inflation increases short- and long-term inflation expectations. This initial...

This paper studies the causal effect of inflation literacy on inflation expectations and trust in the central bank using a randomized control trial (RCT) on a representative sample of the German population. In an experiment with two steps, we first test the effect of non-numerical information...

On 3 June 2020, the German government announced a temporary value added tax (VAT) rate reduction. VAT rates were reduced on 1 July 2020 and went back to their previous level on 1 January 2021. We study the price effects of the temporary VAT rate reduction using a web-scraped data set covering...

How do global political shocks influence individuals’ expectations about economic outcomes? We run a unique survey on inflation expectations among 145 tenured economics professors in Germany and exploit the 2022 Russian invasion in Ukraine as a natural experiment to identify the effect of a...