We use a large-scale representative survey of households from October 19-21 that elicits respondents' expectations about the presidential election's outcome as well as their economic expectations to document several new facts. First, people disagree strongly about the likely outcome of the...

Manpower constraints are the pervasive lack of specialized high- and low-skill workers, irrespective of the wage firms might offer. For a panel of German firms, we show manpower-constrained firms have higher capacity utilization and longer backlog of orders (measured in months). They are more...

We develop a novel firm-level measure of cybersecurity risk using textual analysis of cybersecurity-risk disclosures in corporate filings. The measure successfully identifies firms extensively discussing cybersecurity risk in their 10-K, displays intuitive relations with quantitative measures of...

Communication targeting households and firms has become a stand-alone policy tool of many central banks. But which forms of communication, if any, can reach ordinary people and manage their economic expectations effectively? In a large-scale randomized control trial, we show that communication...

Binding lower bounds on interest rates and large government deficits limit the scope of fiscal and monetary policies to stimulate households' spending through financial intermediaries and firms. Policymakers have thus been implementing unconventional policies that aim to increase households'...

Rising government debt levels around the world are raising the specter that authorities might seek to inflate away the debt. In theoretical settings where fiscal policy "dominates" monetary policy, higher debt without offsetting changes in primary surpluses should lead households to anticipate...

Using a new survey of European households, we study how exogenous variation in the macroeconomic uncertainty perceived by households affects their spending decisions. We use randomized information treatments that provide different types of information about the first and/or second moments of...

Die Wirtschaft in Ostdeutschland und Sachsen dürfte in den Jahren 2017 und 2018 kräftig expandieren. Das preisbereinigte Bruttoinlandsprodukt wird in Ostdeutschland im laufenden und im kommenden Jahr voraussichtlich um jeweils 1,8 % zulegen. In Sachsen dürfte sich die Wirtschaft mit...

Im März 2017 wurden die Ergebnisse für das Wirtschaftswachstum im Jahr 2015 auf der Ebene der Bundesländer außergewöhnlich kräftig überarbeitet. Neben den üblichen Anpassungen aufgrund neu verfügbarer Daten dürften hierfür unter anderem Schwierigkeiten bei der Schätzung der...