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....

We use surveys of German households and firms to study the extent of information frictions among different groups of economic agents. Firms' expectations about the central bank policy rate, inflation, and aggregate unemployment are more aligned with expert forecasts and less dispersed than...