Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. For example, being inactive on social media can lead to social exclusion or not owning luxury brands can be associated with having a low social status. We show that, in the presence of such spillovers to...

We leverage the small open economy Switzerland as a testing ground for basic premises of macroeconomic models of endogenous information acquisition, using tailored surveys of firms and households. First, we show that firms perceive a greater exposure to exchange rate movements than households,...

We study people’s subjective models of the macroeconomy and shed light on their at-tentional foundations. To do so, we measure beliefs about the effects of macroeconomic shocks on unemployment and inflation, providing respondents with identical information about the parameters of the shocks...

In a large-scale online experiment with U.S. Democrats, we examine how the demand for a newsletter about an economic relief plan changes when the newsletter content is fact-checked. We first document an overall muted demand for factchecking when the newsletter features stories from an...

We review the emerging literature on information acquisition in field settings. We first document an increase in studies on information acquisition and review relevant studies in different subfields of economics, including macroeconomics, political economy, labor economics, health economics, and...

In a large-scale online experiment with U.S. Democrats, we examine how the demand for a newsletter about an economic relief plan changes when the newsletter content is fact-checked. We first document an overall muted demand for fact-checking when the newsletter features stories from an...

Using a sample of 2,200 households representative of the US population and a sample of more than 1,000 experts, we measure beliefs about how aggregate unemployment and ination respond to different macroeconomic shocks. Expert predictions are quantitatively close to standard DSGE models and VAR...

We propose a method to measure people's subjective models of the macroeconomy. Using a sample of 2,200 households representative of the US population and a sample of more than 1,000 experts, we measure beliefs about how the unemployment rate and the inflation rate respond to four different...

We examine whether the desire for more information is people's dominant motive for reading economic and political news. Drawing on representative samples of the U.S. population with more than 15,000 respondents in total, we measure and experimentally vary people's beliefs about the...

We review methodological questions relevant for the design of information provision experiments. We first provide a literature review of major areas in which information provision experiments are applied. We then outline key measurement challenges and design recommendations that may be of help...