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 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...

Wealthier households obtain higher returns on their investments than poorer ones. How should the tax system account for this return inequality? I study capital taxation in an economy in which return rates endogenously correlate with wealth. The leading example is a financial market, where the...

This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level dataset that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The...

Using a representative online panel from the US, we examine how individuals’ macroeconomic expectations causally affect their personal economic prospects and their behavior. To exogenously vary respondents’ expectations we provide them with different professional forecasts about the...

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,...

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 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 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...