We survey a representative sample of US households to study how exposure to the COVID-19 stock market crash affects expectations and planned behavior. Wealth shocks are associated with upward adjustments of expectations about retirement age, desired working hours, and household debt, but have...

We use data from a German online brokerage and a survey to show that retail investors sharply reduce risk-taking in response to nearby firm bankruptcies, which are not predictive of returns. The e.ects on trading are spatially highly concentrated, immediate and not persistent. They seem to...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

We provide evidence on narratives about the macroeconomy-the stories people tell to explain macroeconomic phenomena-in the context of a historic surge in inflation. In surveys with more than 10,000 US households and 100 academic experts, we measure economic narratives in open-ended survey...