Yale for valuable comments. Weber gratefully acknowledges financial support from the University of Chicago, the Neubauer Family Foundation, and the Fama-Miller Center. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
Cognitive abilities help explain the large cross-sectional variation in inflation expectations at the household level. But which type of cognitive abilities are important? We find that not only quantitative abilities but also logical and verbal abilities are important to explain the accuracy and plausibility of households' inflation expectations. We discuss the channels through which different forms of cognition might shape households' abilities to forecast future macroeconomic variables. We also draw implications for the effectiveness of policies that aim to manage households' expectations.
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' spending directly through managing their expectations. We first show theoretically and empirically that higher inflation expectations increase households' consumption. We then design a difference-in-differences strategy to assess the effectiveness of unconventional fiscal policy and forward guidance, both of which aim to raise aggregate demand via managing expectations. Whereas unconventional fiscal policy increases households' expectations and spending, forward guidance announcements do not.
Forecast errors for inflation decline monotonically with both verbal and quantitative IQ in a large and representative male population. Within individuals, inflation expectations and perceptions are autocorrelated only for men above the median by IQ (high-IQ men). High-IQ men's forecast revisions are consistent with the diagnostic-expectations framework, whereas anything goes for low-IQ men. Education levels, income, socioeconomic status, or financial constraints do not explain these results. Using ad-hoc tasks in a controlled environment, we investigate the channels behind these results. Low-IQ individuals' knowledge of the concept of inflation is low; they associate inflation with concrete goods and services instead of abstract economic concepts, and are less capable of forecasting mean-reverting processes. Differences in expectations formation by IQ feed into choice-only high-IQ men plan to spend more when expecting higher inflation as the consumer Euler equation prescribes. Our results have implications for heterogeneous-beliefs models of consumption, saving, and investment.
Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We provide preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of such policies using changes in value-added tax (VAT) and household survey data for Poland. We find households increased their inflation expectations and willingness to purchase durables before the increase in VAT. Future research has to ensure income, wealth effects, or intratemporal substitution channels cannot explain these results and ideally exploit exogenous variation in VAT in a fixed nominal interest rate environment.
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