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We study how individual unemployment expectations are shaped and updated using a unique longitudinal survey data set with subjective unemployment expectations. The survey data is linked with third-party reported administrative data on unemployment realizations, such that we are able to examine how prediction errors lead individuals to update their unemployment expectations. We find that people are constantly uncertain about their unemployment prospects. The uncertainty causes them to adjust their unemployment expectations when their predictions turned out to be incorrect. As a result, people’s expectations concerning future unemployment are not constant and they are heterogeneous across the population at any given point in time. We document that unemployment expectations and prediction errors are important determinants of economic decisions, such as how much to save or whether to insure against earnings losses. Subjective unemployment expectations can thus help explain why people, who are observationally similar, make differently economic decisions.

Based on long-term fieldwork among members of the formerly influential Sunni Muslim Hizmet community in Istanbul in 2015, this contribution traces the 'un/veiling trajectory' of a woman called Lale, referring to her shifting engagement with the headscarf over a period of almost three decades. Rather than exemplifying a fragmented religiosity, these shifts are understood as articulations of Lale's aspiration to align her Islamic commitment with the secular boundary for public religiosity, which is defined - and frequently redefined - by the Turkish state. Drawing on the notion of 'pious citizenship', Lale's un/veiling trajectory constitutes the ethnographic ground for unravelling how, in Turkey, the secular boundary for public religiosity has reshaped Islamic ethical practice in three different ways: through state-imposed restrictions, as citizenly self-discipline, and by animating contestation between different religious Muslim groups. The contribution thus argues that Lale's shifting engagement with the headscarf articulates a mode of Islamic commitment that is intimately, yet uneasily, intertwined with secular discourses, aesthetics, and sensitivities. In so doing, it brings forth an interplay between Islam and secularism that is much more intricate than the image of a binary opposition allows.