Incorporating arbitrage-free term-structure dynamics into a semi-structural macro-model, we jointly estimate the real equilibrium interest rate (r*), trend inflation, and term premia for the United States and the euro area, using a Bayesian approach. The natural real rate and trend inflation are...

Standard program evaluations implicitly assume that individuals are perfectly informed about the considered policy change and the related institutional rules. This seems not very plausible in many contexts, as diverse examples show. However, evidence on how incomplete information affects the...

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...

We study belief updating about relative performance in an egorelevant task. Manipulating beliefs about the ego-relevance of the task, we show that subjects update their beliefs about relative performance more optimistically as direct belief utility increases. This finding provides clean evidence...

We explore the consequences of losing confidence in the price-stability objective of central banks by quantifying the inflation and deflationary biases in inflation expectations. In a model with an occasionally binding zero-lower-bound constraint, we show that an inflation bias as well as a...

Certainly the current crisis is affecting seriously the convergence process in EU. Starting from the spatial distribution in EU of some fundamental development indicators before the current crisis, we try to estimate the impact of the prolonged crisis. During last years, the less developed...

We analyze differences in consumption and wealth that arise because of different degrees of rationality of households. In particular, we use a standard New Keynesian model and let a certain fraction of households be fully rational while the other fraction possesses less cognitive ability. We...

The present paper studies the effect of monetary policy on inflation and output within a New Keynesian model with Experience-Based Learning (EBL) that renders expectations heterogeneous across age groups. Under EBL, the age-distribution directly affects the composition of aggregate expectations...

This paper proposes a general statistical framework for systemic financial stress indexes. Several existing index designs can be represented as special cases. We introduce a daily variant of the ECB's CISS for the euro area and the US. The CISS aggregates a representative set of stress...