There is a growing interest in studying the disagreement of economic agents. Most studies, however, focus on the disagreement regarding one specific variable, hereby neglecting that disagreement may be comoving with disagreement on other variables. In this paper we explore to which extent...

A sudden change in monetary policy happened in Switzerland on January 15th, 2015. The Swiss National Bank removed a lower exchange rate bound vis-à-vis the Euro. This unexpected change of regime induced a temporary uncertainty about future prices in foreign markets. We believe that this hampers...

Does increased policy uncertainty dampen investment plans of firms? We provide direct evidence on this question by examining the effects of an unexpectedly accepted and farreaching referendum in Switzerland in February 2014. The vote has put several economically relevant agreements between...

We review and evaluate methods previously adopted in the applied literature of adaptive learning in order to initialize agents' beliefs. Previous methods are classified into three broad classes: equilibrium-related, training sample-based, and estimation-based. We conduct several simulations...

Under adaptive learning, recursive algorithms are proposed to represent how agents update their beliefs over time. For applied purposes these algorithms require initial estimates of agents perceived law of motion. Obtaining appropriate initial estimates can become prohibitive within the usual...

Adaptive learning under constant-gain allows persistent deviations of beliefs from equilibrium so as to more realistically reflect agents' attempt of tracking the continuous evolution of the economy. A characterization of these beliefs is therefore paramount to a proper understanding of the role...

Uncertainty shapes the trajectory of business cycles and remains a central research topic in Macroeconomics. When studying the impact of uncertainty on the economy, economists use different uncertainty measures. While all indicators approximate uncertainty along some certain dimension, none of...

This paper studies the dynamic effects of an uncertainty shock on firm expectations. We conduct a survey that confronts managers from a representative firm sample with a model-consistent uncertainty shock scenario. An exogenous increase in uncertainty significantly reduces managers' expected...

Using the microdata of the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we evaluate whether U.S. consumers form macroeconomic expectations consistent with different economic concepts. We check whether their expectations are in line with the Phillips Curve, the Taylor Rule and the Income Fisher Equation. We...

We compare forecasts from different adaptive learning algorithms and calibrations applied to US real-time data on inflation and growth. We find that the Least Squares with constant gains adjusted to match (past) survey forecasts provides the best overall performance both in terms of forecasting...