We conduct a large-scale survey to shed light on what people believe about public finance. An experiment demonstrates that central bank communication can persistently shift views on monetary financing. It further suggests that views on monetary financing impact support for fiscal discipline.
This paper brings novel insights into group coordination and price dynamics in complex environments. We implement a chaotic overlapping-generation model in the lab and find that group coordination is always on the steady state or on the two-cycle and that behavior is non-monotonic.
A multi-country consumer survey investigates why and how much households decreased their consumption in five key sectors after pandemic-related restrictions were lifted in Europe in July 2020. Beyond infection risk and precautionary saving motives, households also reported not missing some consumption items, which may indicate preference shifts and structural changes in the post-COVID-19 economy.
In a laboratory experiment, we ask participants to predict inflation using three different policy regimes: inflation targeting—with and without greater communication of the target—average inflation targeting and price level targeting. We use participants’ predictions to compare the level and stability of inflation under each regime.
Economic activities typically involve coordination among a large number of agents. These agents have to anticipate what other agents think before making their own decisions.
This research develops a model in which the economy is directly influenced by how pessimistic or optimistic economic agents are about the future. The agents may hold different views and update them as new economic data become available.
Most models in finance assume that agents make trading plans over the infinite future. We consider instead that they are boundedly rational and may only form forecasts over a limited horizon.
