We provide evidence on the dynamics, drivers, and consequences of attention to the macroeconomy using tailored panel surveys of German firms and households. Draw-ing on novel measures of attention based on open-ended questions collected before and during a historic shock to inflation, we...

Attention to the economy plays a key role in canonical macro models, yet its empirical properties are not well understood. We collect novel measures of attention to the economy based on open-ended survey questions. Our measures are included in tailored panel surveys of German firms and...

Attention to the economy plays a key role in canonical macro models, yet its empirical properties are not well understood. We collect novel measures of attention to the economy based on open-ended survey questions. Our measures are included in tailored panel surveys of German firms and...

We survey samples of German firms and households to document novel stylized facts about the extent of information frictions among the two groups. First, firms' expectations about macroeconomic variables are closer to expert forecasts and less dispersed than households', consistent with higher...

We survey samples of German firms and households to document novel stylized facts about the extent of information frictions among the two groups. First, firms' expectations about macroeconomic variables are closer to expert forecasts and less dispersed than households', consistent with higher...

This paper offers a first empirical investigation of how labor taxation (income and payroll taxes) affects individuals' well-being. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in tax rules over time and across demographic groups using 26 years of German panel data. We find that the tax...