The euro has been the predominant safe haven currency for households in Southeastern Europe (SEE). Recent results of the OeNB Euro Survey show that the sovereign debt crisis had a substantial impact on households’ trust in the euro but nevertheless suggest that the euro has not been displaced...

This paper exploits the information collected from an ad hoc survey conducted on a sample of Macedonian firms to study the extent of nominal price and wage rigidities in the Republic of Macedonia. The research was motivated by the observation that sticky prices influence the responsiveness of...

We combine questions from the Michigan Survey about future inflation, unemployment, and interest rates to investigate whether households are aware of the basic features of U.S. monetary policy. Our findings provide evidence that some households form their expectations in a way that is consistent...

We analyse the influence of climate on average life satisfaction in 79 countries using data from the World Values Survey. Climate is described in terms of ‘degree-months’ calculated as the cumulated monthly deviations from a base temperature of 65°F (18.3°C). Our results suggest that...

This paper investigates the time-varying nature of expectation formation rules for institutional investors in the foreign exchange market. Using a dataset of survey expectations for four exchange rates, we first distinguish three different general rules. We find a momentum rule, a fundamental...

A growing body of work on social phenomena (like status, peer effects, social comparisons and fashion) rests on assumptions regarding the social observability of consumption activities. The present paper provides new empirical evidence for assessing such assumptions. We analyze data from a...

Chartist and fundamentalist models have proven to be capable of replicating stylized facts on speculative markets. In general, this is achieved by specifying nonlinear interactions of otherwise linear asset price expectations of the respective trader groups. This paper investigates whether or...

This paper considers the widely admitted ill-posed inverse problem for measurement error models: estimating the distribution of a latent variable X∗ from an observed sample of X, a contaminated measurement of X∗. We show that the inverse problem is well-posed for self-reporting data under...

This paper summarizes the micro-level survey evidence from Central Asia generated and analyzed in the period 1991–2012. We provide an exhaustive overview over all accessible individual and household-level surveys undertaken in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan –...

We use household survey data from Hungary to analyse the determinants of foreign currency (FX) borrowing. We do not find evidence that Hungarian FX borrowers are better educated, wealthier or more risk-loving than their peers. In fact, FX borrowing is a common phenomenon driven mostly by...