This paper combines several administrative data and a survey experiment to evaluate the role of lifestyle changes in influencing inflation expectations. Using data from Nielsen's Homescan Panel, as well as a leading bank in Singapore, we first document that households are upgrading across...

A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent con-sumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarceempirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African householddata and nds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively moreon visible...

Expenditure visibility—the extent to which a household's spending on a consumption category is noticeable to others—is measured in three new surveys, with ~3,000 telephone and online respondents. Visibility shows little change across time (ten years) and survey methods. Four different...

Central banks emphasize the use of communication as a tool of monetary policy. As central banks increasingly recognize that low public informedness limits their ability to communicate with the general public, several have begun to explicitly tailor their communication strategies for a broader...

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,...

This paper uses an experiment embedded in a survey to analyze the response of consumers' long-run inflation expectations to information about the Federal Reserve's inflation target and a graph and summary of past inflation. On average, respondents revise forecasts toward the 2% target with...

We provide survey evidence on how households’ inflation expectations matter for their spending highlighting a behavioral distortion compared to the New Keynesian setup. A large share of households expects prices to remain stable instead of increasing. Such a belief is linked to individual...

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 provide survey evidence on how households’ inflation expectations matter for their spending highlighting a behavioral distortion compared to the New Keynesian setup. A large share of households expects prices to remain stable instead of increasing. Such a belief is linked to individual...

We exploit a novel natural experiment to establish a clear causal relation between media attention and consumer investment behavior. Our findings indicate a 31 percent local average increase in quarterly capital flows into mutual funds mentioned in a prominent Wall Street Journal “Category...