Household over-indebtedness has increased worldwide. This study investigates one possible reason for this increase: biased income expectations. Thereby, we refer to the "permanent income hypothesis", which predicts that individuals borrow more today if they expect a higher income in the future....

We analyze the impact of overconfidence on gender differences in wage expectations using elicited beliefs of German university applicants. Interestingly, female students have lower wage expectations and are less overconfident than their male counterparts. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions show that...

What is the role of heterogenous house-price expectations for boom-bust cycles in the housing market? We exploit a unique Dutch panel data set on households' house price expectations and their consumption, savings and housing choices for the period 2003-2016. This period was characterized by a...

This research note empirically investigates whether cash can prevent consumers from making needless purchases in unexpected shopping situations. Cash can have a disciplinary effect on short-term consumption because it imposes a strong temporary budget constraint and also reinforces the pain of...

Exploiting the natural experiment of the German reunification, we examine how consumers adapt to a new environment in their macroeconomic forecasting. We document that East Germans expect higher inflation and make larger forecast errors than West Germans even decades after reunification....