Search

Der Angriffskrieg Russlands auf die Ukraine im Frühjahr 2022 und dessen Auswirkungen stellen Europa, und in besonderem Maße Deutschland, vor große wirtschaftliche Herausforderungen. Die Energiepreise sind seit Beginn des Krieges weiter kräftig gestiegen. Die deutliche Einschränkung russischer Energielieferungen im Sommer 2022 hat die Energiekrise verschärft und die bereits im Jahr 2021 erhöhte Inflation weiter angeheizt. Dies belastet Haushalte und Unternehmen massiv. Um die Energiekrise solidarisch zu bewältigen, sind umfangreiche Maßnahmen gegen die Energieknappheit und zielgenaue Entlastungen notwendig. Aufgrund der veränderten geopolitischen Situation und der Energiekrise sind Deutschland und Europa mit einer neuen Realität konfrontiert. Diese gilt es, aktiv und in enger Kooperation mit den EU-Mitgliedstaaten zu gestalten. Mittel- bis langfristige Herausforderungen wie die Dekarbonisierung, die demografische Alterung und die Stabilität der Wirtschafts- und Währungsunion dürfen nicht in den Hintergrund rücken. All dies erfordert ein gemeinsames Vorgehen und Solidarität in Europa.

Inflation expectations are central to economics because they affect the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policy as well as realized inflation. We survey the recent literature with a focus on the inflation expectations of households. We first review standard data sources and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. We then document that household inflation expectations are biased upwards, dispersed across individuals, and volatile in the time series. We also provide evidence of systematic differences by gender, income, education, and race. Turning to the underlying expectations formation process, we highlight the role of individuals' exposure to price signals in their daily lives, such as price changes in groceries, the role of lifetime experiences, and the role of cognition. We then discuss the literature that links inflation expectations to economic decisions at the individual level, including consumption-savings and financial decisions. We conclude with an outlook for future research.

Expectations about economic variables vary systematically across genders. In the domain of inflation, women have persistently higher expectations than men. We argue that traditional gender roles are a significant factor in generating this gender expectations gap as they expose women and men to different economic signals in their daily lives. Using unique data on the participation of men and women in household grocery chores, their resulting exposure to price signals, and their inflation expectations, we document a tight link between the gender expectations gap and the distribution of grocery shopping duties. Because grocery prices are highly volatile, and consumers focus disproportionally on positive price changes, frequent exposure to grocery prices increases perceptions of current inflation and expectations of future inflation. The gender expectations gap is largest in households whose female heads are solely responsible for grocery shopping, whereas no gap arises in households that split grocery chores equally between men and women. Our results indicate that gender differences in inflation expectations arise due to social conditioning rather than through differences in innate abilities, skills, or preferences.

Expectations about macro-finance variables, such as inflation, vary significantly across genders, even within the same household. We conjecture that traditional gender roles expose women and men to different economic signals in their daily lives, which in turn produce systematic variation in expectations. Using unique data on the contributions of men and women to household grocery chores, their resulting exposure to price signals, and their inflation expectations, we show that the gender expectations gap is tightly linked to participation in grocery shopping. We also document a gender gap in other economic expectations and discuss how it might affect economic choices.

We show that, to form aggregate inflation expectations, consumers rely on the price changes they face in their daily lives while grocery shopping. Specifically, the frequency and size of price changes, rather than their expenditure share, matter for individuals’ inflation expectations. To document these facts, we collect novel micro data for a representative US sample that uniquely match individual expectations, detailed information about consumption bundles, and item-level prices. Our results suggest that the frequency and size of grocery-price changes to which consumers are personally exposed should be incorporated in models of expectations formation. Central banks' focus on core inflation - which excludes grocery prices - to design expectations-based policies might lead to systematic mistakes.

How do macro financial shocks affect investor behavior and market dynamics? Recent evidence on experience effects suggests a long-lasting influence of personally experienced outcomes on investor beliefs and investment but also significant differences across older and younger generations. We formalize experience-based learning in an overlapping gen- erations (OLG) model, where different cross-cohort experiences generate persistent het-erogeneity in beliefs, portfolio choices, and trade. The model allows us to characterize a novel link between investor demographics and the dependence of prices on past dividends while also generating known features of asset prices, such as excess volatility and return predictability. The model produces new implications for the cross-section of asset holdings, trade volume, and investors’ heterogenous responses to recent financial crises, which we show to be in line with the data.