We use novel survey data to estimate how personal experiences affect household expectations about aggregate economic outcomes in housing and labor markets. We exploit variation in locally experienced house prices to show that individuals systematically extrapolate from recent locally experienced...

Home price expectations are believed to play an important role in housing dynamics, yet we have limited understanding of how they are formed and how they affect behavior. Using a unique "information experiment" embedded in an online survey, this paper investigates how consumers' home price...

Inflation expectations are a key variable in conducting monetary policy. However, these expectations are generally unobservable and only certain proxy variables exist, such as surveys on inflation expectations. This paper offers guidance on the appropriate quantification of household inflation...

The recent house price experiences within an individual's social network affect her perceptions of the attractiveness of property investments, and through this channel have large effects on her housing market activity. Our data combine anonymized social network information from Facebook with...

Limited memory capacity, retrieval constraints and anchoring are central to expectation formation processes. We develop a model of adaptive expectations where individuals are able to store only a finite number of past experiences of a stochastic state variable. Retrieval of these experiences is...

We survey samples of German firms and households to document novel stylized facts about the extent of information frictions among the two groups. First, firms' expectations about macroeconomic variables are closer to expert forecasts and less dispersed than households', consistent with higher...