The "annuity puzzle" refers to the fact that annuities are rarely purchased despite the longevity insurance they provide. Most explanations for this puzzle assume that individuals have accurate expectations about their future survival. We provide evidence that individuals mis-perceive their...

This paper investigates individuals' expectations about their own survival to older ages and compares patterns in average responses about survival chances with actual and projected survival rates. The extent to which individuals have, on average, accurate expectations about survival to older...

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 study the effects of forward guidance with an approach that combines theory with experimental estimates of counterfactual expectation adjustments. Guided by the model, we conduct experiments with representative samples of the US population to study how households adjust their expectations in...

We study the effects of monetary policy on aggregate consumption combining a heterogeneous agent model with measured expectations under different policy counterfactuals. We express the consumption of non-hand-to-mouth households as a function of expectations only and elicit all expectations...

We study the effects of monetary policy on aggregate consumption combining a heterogeneous agent model with measured expectations under different policy counterfactuals. We express the consumption of non-hand-to-mouth households as a function of expectations only and elicit all expectations...

Many models of investor behavior predict that investors prefer assets that they believe to have positively skewed return distributions. We provide a direct test of this prediction in a representative sample of the Dutch population. Using individual-level data on return expectations for a broad...

This paper empirically investigates individuals' attention allocation behavior and its economic implications on expectation formation and consumption choice. We measure attention with data from the Michigan Survey of Consumers (MSC), in which respondents were asked to report what economic news...

Expectations about different macroeconomic aspects correlate with each other. I perform a structural test in the framework of the noisy information model and show that individual forms their expectations on multiple macroeconomic variables jointly rather than independently, thus causing these...

I propose a flexible non-parametric method using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to estimate a generalized model of expectation formation. This approach does not rely on restrictive assumptions of functional forms and parametric methods yet nests the standard approaches of empirical studies on...