Individuals with extensive debt may be granted debt relief in court. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the Danish debt relief program with data from court records linked to nationwide register data. Using event-study methods and quasi-random assignment of applicants to court trustees with...

We study the effects of monetary policy on aggregate consumption combining a heterogeneous agent model with measured expectations under different policy counterfactuals. We express the consumption of non-hand-to-mouth households as a function of expectations only and elicit all expectations...

We study the redistributive effects of inflation combining administrative bank data with an information provision experiment during an episode of historic inflation. On average, households are well-informed about prevailing inflation and are concerned about its impact on their wealth; yet, while...

This paper shows that households with positional concerns and convex status utility use gambling to attempt leapfrogging in the social hierarchy. We test this theoretical prediction relying on household data that is representative for Germany, proxying the status orientation of households by...

We document five effects of providing individuals with crowdsourced spending information about their peers (individuals with similar characteristics) through a FinTech app. First, users who spend more than their peers reduce their spending significantly, whereas users who spend less keep...

We propose a method to measure people’s subjective models of the macroeconomy. 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 the unemployment rate and the inflation rate respond to four different...

We conduct an experiment with a representative sample from the US to study households' demand for macroeconomic information. Respondents who learn of a higher personal exposure to unemployment risk during recessions increase their demand for an expert forecast about the likelihood of a...

We leverage the small open economy Switzerland as a testing ground for basic premises of macroeconomic models of endogenous information acquisition, using tailored surveys of firms and households. First, we show that firms perceive a greater exposure to exchange rate movements than households,...

The recent house price experiences within an individual’s social network affect her perceptions of the attractiveness of property investments, and through this channel have large effects on her housing market activity. Our data combine anonymized social network information from Facebook with...

Evaluating a new survey dataset of German consumers, we test whether individual consumption plans are formed according to an Euler equation derived from consumption life-cycle models. Estimating several consumption Euler equations, the results are mostly in line with the theory: We find evidence...