We provide evidence on the dynamics, drivers, and consequences of attention to the macroeconomy using tailored panel surveys of German firms and households. Draw-ing on novel measures of attention based on open-ended questions collected before and during a historic shock to inflation, we...

Economic theory predicts that intertemporal decisions depend critically on expectations about future outcomes. Using the universe of professional survey forecasts for the United States, we document the behavior of the entire term structure of expectations for output growth, inflation, and the...

We study people’s subjective models of the macroeconomy and shed light on their at-tentional foundations. To do so, we measure beliefs about the effects of macroeconomic shocks on unemployment and inflation, providing respondents with identical information about the parameters of the shocks...

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...

This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new survey panel on German manufacturing firms, we show that uncertainty reflects change: Planning incorporates higher subjective uncertainty about future sales growth when the firm has just experienced unusual growth, and more so if...

We survey retail investors at an online bank to study beliefs about the autocorrelation of aggregate stock returns, and how these beliefs shape investment decisions measured in administrative account data. Individuals' beliefs exhibit substantial heterogeneity and predict trading responses to...