We investigate the role played by the media in the expectations formation process of households. Using a novel news-topic-based approach we show that news types the media choose to report on, e.g., fiscal policy, health, and politics, are good predictors of households' stated inflation...

Measuring economic uncertainty is crucial for understanding investment decisions by individuals and firms. Macroeconomists increasingly rely on survey data on subjective expectations. An innovative approach to measure aggregate uncertainty exploits the rounding patterns in individuals' responses...

Using a representative online panel from the US, we examine how individuals' macroeconomic expectations causally affect their personal economic prospects and their behavior. To exogenously vary respondents' expectations we provide them with different professional forecasts about the likelihood...

Macroeconomic models often invoke consumption "habits" to explain the substantial persistence of macroeconomic consumption growth. But a large literature has found no evidence of habits in the microeconomic datasets that measure the behavior of individual households. We show that the apparent...

This survey discusses behavioral and experimental macroeconomics emphasizing a complex systems perspective. The economy consists of boundedly rational heterogeneous agents who do not fully understand their complex environment and use simple decision heuristics. Central to our survey is the...

Using a representative online panel from the US, we examine how individuals' macroeconomic expectations causally affect their personal economic prospects and their behavior. To exogenously vary respondents' expectations, we provide them with different professional forecasts about the likelihood...

We propose an extension of the class of rational expectations bubbles (REBs) to the more general rational beliefs setting of Kurz (1994a,b). In a potentially non-stationary but stationarizable environment, among an heterogenous population of agents, it is possible to hold more than one...

We introduce a simple equilibrium model of a market for loans, where households lend to firms based on heterogeneous expectations about their loan default probability. Agents select among heterogeneous expectation rules, based upon their relative performance. A small fraction of pessimistic...

We experimentally investigate how price expectations are formed in a large asset market where subjects' only task is to forecast the future price of a risky asset. The realized prices depend on these expectations. We observe small (6 participants) and large markets (about 100 participants). In...