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....

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...

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....

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...

Not in the Shopping Cart -On the experiential aspects of retail shopping centers It is not hard to imagine that consumers value not only what they have bought in a store and can take home with them, but also the experience that was entailed in the actual purchase. The aim of the study is to...

Whether couples pool their resources and behave like a unit or spend their income individually is crucial for social and tax policy. In this paper, I provide a test of the income pooling hypothesis using administrative cross-sectional survey data on expenditures and individual incomes of couple...

This paper addresses a general problem with surveys asking agents for their assessment of the state of the economy: answers are highly dependent on information that is publicly available, while only information that is not already publicly known has the potential to improve a professional...

This study investigates the benefits of cash in a general context. First, we explicitly address the arguments of cash critics, who are calling for cash to be abolished altogether. Second, we show that cash plays a crucial role in the current two-tier banking system. Third, we are discussing a...

This study realizes the benefits of optical fiber broadband as an economic stimulation thus it analyzes the determinants of optical fiber share in total broadband connections in OECD countries with the focus on the demand-driven factors and the government roles as the stimulator, the regulator...