This paper takes a critical look at available proxies of uncertainty. Two questions are adressed: (i) How do we evaluate proxies given that subjective uncertainty is inherently unobservable? (ii) Is there such a thing as a general macroeconomic uncertainty? Using correlations, some narrative...

To evaluate measures of expectations I examine and compare some of the most common methods for capturing expectations: the futures method which utilizes financial market prices, the VAR forecast method, and the survey method. I study average expectations on the Federal funds rate target, and the...

In this paper we investigate the demand for local public school expenditures in Sweden. By using survey data, a method previously never applied to Swedish data, the paper provides an additional piece of evidence on individual demand for publicly provided local services. Estimating a linear...

Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007/8, new lending in the Euro-Area has slowed sharply and the old loans experienced "evergreening," i.e. bad loans have been rolled over rather than being liquidated. Even though ameliorating evergreening is key to promote lending for new...

It is widely admitted that the inverse problem of estimating the distribution of a latent variable X* from an observed sample of X, a contaminated measurement of X*, is ill-posed. This paper shows that measurement error models for self-reporting data are well-posed, assuming the probability of...

We study whether firms' expectations react to the Bank of England's monetary policy announcements by comparing the responses to the Decision Maker Panel (DMP) survey filed immediately before and after a Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting. On the one hand, we find that firms' expectations...

We investigate the relation between foreign exchange (FX) order flow and the forward bias. We outline a decomposition of the forward bias according to which a negative correlation between interest rate differentials and order flow creates a time-varying risk premium consistent with that bias....

Recent empirical and theoretical studies have suggested that consumption growth reacts asymmetrically to positive and negative expected income growth. In this paper we investigate if this behavior is robust to a) assumptions on how the households form their expectations of future earnings and b)...

Existing empirical evidence suggest that entrepreneurs are optimists, a finding researchers often interpret as evidence of a behavioral bias in entrepreneurial decision-making. We revisit this claim by analyzing an unusually large survey dataset (180,814 responses) that allows us to create a...

Survey data indicate that a relatively large share of households is ill-informed about the rate of inflation in the economy, with perceived and expected rates of inflation deviating substantially from official measures. Using Swedish micro-level data, we find that such inflation illiteracy is...