We examine the efficacy of affirmative action at universities whose value depends on peer and alumni networks. We study an elite Brazilian university that adopted race- and income-based affirmative action at a large scale. Using employer-employee data, we show that a key benefit of attending the...

We compare the causal effects of forward guidance communication about future interest rates on households' expectations of inflation, mortgage rates, and unemployment to the effects of communication about future inflation in a randomized controlled trial using more than 25,000 U.S. individuals...

Introducing a new survey of U.S. firms' inflation expectations, we document key stylized facts involving what U.S. firms know and expect about inflation and monetary policy. The resulting time series of firms' inflation expectations displays unique dynamics, distinct from those of households and...

We document a new fact: in U.S., European and Japanese surveys, households do not expect deflation, even in environments where persistent deflation is a strong possibility. This fact stands in contrast to the standard macroeconomic models with rational expectations. We extend a standard New...

We implement a survey of Dutch households in which random subsets of respondents receive information about inflation. The resulting exogenously generated variation in inflation expectations is used to assess how expectations affect subsequent monthly consumption decisions relative to those in a...

Rising government debt levels around the world are raising the specter that authorities might seek to inflate away the debt. In theoretical settings where fiscal policy "dominates" monetary policy, higher debt without offsetting changes in primary surpluses should lead households to anticipate...

We use a unique design feature of a survey of Italian firms to study the causal effect of inflation expectations on firms' economic decisions. In the survey, a randomly chosen subset of firms is repeatedly treated with information about recent inflation (or the European Central Bank's inflation...

This paper provides new survey evidence on firms' inflation expectations in the euro area. Building on the ECB's Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE), we introduce consistent measurement of inflation expectations across countries and shed new light on the properties and causal...

We match survey data of Italian firms that includes a repeated experiment in which information about inflation is randomly provided to firms over time with detailed credit data that covers the borrowing decisions of firms. This allows us to study how exogenous variation in inflation expectations...

Using randomized control trials (RCTs) applied over time in different countries, we study how the economic environment affects how agents learn from new information. We show that as inflation has recently risen in advanced economies, both households and firms have become more attentive and...