Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
家庭层面冲击对经济信念的过度敏感：基于关联调查与行政数据的证据
Beliefs About the Economy are Excessively Sensitive to Household-Level Shocks: Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data
摘要
We study how people’s beliefs about the economy covary with household-level events, utilizing a unique link between Danish administrative data and a large-scale survey of consumer expectations. We find that compared to actual inflation, people’s inflation forecasts covary much more strongly (and negatively) with both recently realized household income changes and measures of expected future household income changes. We formally establish that these findings are stark deviations from the Bayesian rational expectations benchmark. Similar results hold for perceptions of past inflation (“backcasts” ), suggesting that imperfect recall is a key mechanism for biased forecasts. Building on this, a series of additional tests, some of which utilize data on adverse health events, suggests that the forecast biases are at least partly due to affect-cued recall. That is, negative (positive) household-level events cue negative (positive) recollections, which lead to pessimistic (optimistic) forecasts.
中文摘要
我们利用丹麦行政数据与大规模消费者预期调查之间的独特关联，研究了人们对经济的信念如何随家庭层面事件而变化。研究发现，相较于实际通胀率，人们的通胀预测与近期已实现的家庭收入变化以及预期的未来家庭收入变化指标之间存在显著更强的负向协动关系。我们正式证明，这些发现与贝叶斯理性预期基准存在显著偏离。类似结果也适用于对过去通胀的感知（"回溯预测"），表明不完美回忆是导致预测偏差的关键机制。在此基础上，一系列附加检验（部分利用不良健康事件数据）表明，预测偏差至少部分源于情感线索回忆——即负面（正面）家庭层面事件会触发负面（正面）回忆，进而导致悲观（乐观）预测。