We compare disagreement in expectations and the frequency of forecast revisions among five categories agents: households, firms, professional forecasters, policymakers participants to laboratory experiments. provide evidence all agents. There is however a strong heterogeneity across categories: while forecasters exhibit low disagreement, firms households show disagreement. This translates into ...

This paper is concerned with univariate noncausal autoregressive models and their potential usefulness in economic applications. We argue that noncausal autoregressive models are especially well suited for modeling expectations. Unlike conventional causal autoregressive models, they explicitly show how the considered economic variable is a¤ected by expectations and how expectations are formed. ...

This paper focuses on an age-old puzzle: why some societies peacefully tolerate high levels of inequality and others do not. We posit that opportunity and mobility over time are as important as current distributions are to the political sustainability of market oriented growth. In addition, we posit that individuals’ subjective assessments of past mobility and their expectations for the future ...

Causal attributions of homelessness may affect both the design and acceptance of public policies aimed at improving the situation of homeless people and the strategies that homeless people themselves decide to adopt in order to cope with their situation. This article analyzes the differences in causal attributions of homelessness based on gender, age, nationality, educational background, percei...

Experimental economics has consistently revealed human behavior at odds with theoretical expectations of rational agents. This is especially true in laboratory games with costly punishment where humans routinely pay to punish others for selfish behavior even though the punisher receives no benefit in return. This phenomenon occurs even when interactions are anonymous and the punisher will never...

The time evolution of aggregate economic variables, such as stock prices, is affected by market expectations of individual investors. Neo-classical economic theory assumes that individuals form expectations rationally, thus enforcing prices to track economic fundamentals and leading to an efficient allocation of resources. However, laboratory experiments with human subjects have shown that indi...

Survey designs that aim at international comparisons of economic expectations are complex. Question wording and response scales must be applicable across countries to provide policy makers with reliable information. Substantial progress on harmonization has been made by the EU in their member surveys. While forming is a difficult task for anyone, business firms have thought distinct advantage o...

We test competing hypotheses from political–economic and neo-liberal theories about the effects of economic growth and urbanization on a neglected, but important, indicator of environmental health: aquatic biodiversity. We analyze crossnational data on the number of threatened fish species within national territorial waters using negative binomial regression. We find that, counter to the expect...

This paper develops a rigorous concept of institutions to investigate the interrelationships between institutional and economic change from the perspective of economic geography. We view institutions neither as behavioural regularities nor as organisations or rules, but conceive institutions as stabilisations of mutual expectations and correlated interaction. The paper discusses how economic in...