Heterogeneity in macroeconomic expectations: the role of individual historical experiences, local conditions, and socio-economic characteristics

预期是现代宏观经济理论的核心。通常对完全信息理性预期(Fire；Muth，1961)或其最近提出的具有信息刚性的变体(Mankiw and Reis，2002；Sims，2003；Woodford，2003)的假设过于简单化，没有考虑到预期的真正异质性。特别是，它们不允许家庭或企业的个人经历影响他们对总体宏观经济变量的预期。同样，个人经验在财务预期和决策形成中的作用还没有得到很好的理解。本研究项目将提供基于调查数据的实证分析，以加深我们对私人家庭或公司的个人经历如何影响他们的预期的理解。这一证据将有助于放松经济模型中常见的假设，即预期是由一个随时间和个体不变的过程形成的。这一研究项目的结果将对学术经济学家和研究预期形成过程的其他学科的研究人员以及货币政策制定者都有用。该项目有助于宏观经济学中不断寻求更好地理解家庭和企业之间异质性的相关性，特别是预期的相关性。我们寻求开发的经验方法将有助于分析调查预期，或一般调查数据，也在不同的背景下。通过将我们的研究议程纳入优先方案，我们寻求促进富有成效的跨学科交流并从中受益。总体而言，该项目将有助于更好地了解有关宏观经济预期的调查数据，从而有助于正确解释这类调查。所有这些问题对于货币政策的实施都是头等重要的，因为现代央行严重依赖预期，既是信息来源，也是引导经济的工具。

Expectations are at the heart of modern macroeconomic theory. The commonly made assumptions of full information rational expectations (FIRE; Muth, 1961) or its recently proposed variants with information rigidities (Mankiw and Reis, 2002; Sims, 2003; Woodford, 2003) are simplistic and do not allow for genuine heterogeneity of expectations. In particular, they do not allow individual experiences of households or firms to affect their expectations of aggregate macroeconomic variables. Similarly, the role of individual experiences in the formation of financial expectations and decision-making is not yet well understood. This research project will provide empirical analyses based on survey data to enhance our understanding of how individual experiences of private households or firms influence their expectations. This evidence will help relaxing the commonly made assumption in economic models that expectations are formed by a process that is invariant across time and individuals.The results of this research project will be useful for both academic economists and researchers from other disciplines that investigate expectation formation processes as well as for monetary policy makers. The project contributes to the ongoing quest in macroeconomics for a better understanding of the relevance of heterogeneity, in particular of expectations, across households and firms. The empirical methods that we seek to develop will be useful for the analysis of survey expectations, or survey data in general, also in different contexts. By embedding our research agenda into the Priority Programme, we seek to contribute to, and benefit from, fruitful interdisciplinary exchange. Overall, the project will lead to a better understanding of survey data on macroeconomic expectations and, thus, will help to properly interpret such surveys. All of these issues are of first-order importance for the conduct of monetary policy because modern central banking relies heavily on expectations, both as a source of information and as a tool to steer the economy.