Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset....

This paper uses data on 5-year gasoline price expectations from the US Michigan Survey of Consumers to investigate their role as a transmission channel for gasoline price shocks. Specifically, a Structural VAR model is estimated to carry out counterfactual analysis which shows that gasoline...

This paper investigates the inflation effects of oil price expectations shocks constructed as functional shocks, i.e. as shifts in the entire oil futures term structure (both standard and risk-adjusted). The latter are then included in a vector autoregressive model with exogenous variables...

It has been forty years since the oil crisis of 1973/74. This crisis has been one of the defining economic events of the 1970s and has shaped how many economists think about oil price shocks. In recent years, a large literature on the economic determinants of oil price fluctuations has emerged....

We examine how speeches by Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members, including regional Fed presidents, shape private sector expectations. Speeches that signal rising inflationary pressures prompt both households and professional forecasters to raise their inflation expectations, consistent...

The ifo Business Climate Index is one of the most important leading indicators for the German economy. It is based on a monthly survey of approximately 9,000 firms and reflects responses to two core questions: the assessment of the firms' current business situation and their expectations for the...

We survey retail investors at an online bank to study beliefs about the autocorrelation of aggregate stock returns, and how these beliefs shape investment decisions measured in administrative account data. Individuals' beliefs exhibit substantial heterogeneity and predict trading responses to...

This exercise offers an innovative learning mechanism to model economic agent's decision-making process using a deep reinforcement learning algorithm. In particular, this AI agent is born in an economic environment with no information on the underlying economic structure and its own preference....

We leverage survey data from Germany, Italy, and the US to document several novel stylized facts about the extent of information frictions among firms and households. First, firms’ expectations about the central bank policy rate, inflation, and aggregate unemployment are more aligned with...

We provide survey evidence on how households’ inflation expectations matter for their spending highlighting a behavioral distortion compared to the New Keynesian setup. A large share of households expects prices to remain stable instead of increasing. Such a belief is linked to individual...