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...

Although there is much interest in the future retail price of gasoline among consumers, industry analysts, and policymakers, it is widely believed that changes in the price of gasoline are essentially unforecastable given publicly available information. We explore several new forecasting...

The role of expectations for economic fluctuations has received considerable attention in recent business cycle analysis. We exploit Markov regime switching models to identify shocks in cointegrated structural vector autoregressions and investigate different identification schemes for bi-variate...

We show that, to form aggregate inflation expectations, consumers rely on the price changes they face in their daily lives while grocery shopping. Specifically, the frequency and size of price changes, rather than their expenditure share, matter for individuals' inflation expectations. To...

We analyse how movements in the components of sovereign bond yields in the United States affect long-term rates in 10 advanced and 21 emerging economies. The paper documents significant global spillovers from both the expectations and term premia components of longterm rates in the United...

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...

Attention to the economy plays a key role in canonical macro models, yet its empirical properties are not well understood. We collect novel measures of attention to the economy based on open-ended survey questions. Our measures are included in tailored panel surveys of German firms and...