Research

When surveys rely on repeat participants, this raises the possibility that survey participation may affect future responses, perhaps by prompting information acquisition between survey waves. We show that these "Learning-through-Survey" effects are large for household inflation expectations. Repeat survey participants generally have lower inflation expectations and uncertainty, particularly if their initial uncertainty was high. Consequently, repeat participants may be more informed, and not be representative of the broader population. This has important implications: for example, inflation expectations of new participants are more influenced by oil prices, and estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution are lower for new participants.


Financial liberalization accelerates global banks' entry into new markets, where they encounter information friction in credit assessment, compared to domestic banks. We demonstrate a duopoly model that domestic banks and information-constrained foreign banks can coexist in the equilibrium. Domestic banks employ a cream-skimming strategy, leveraging their local soft information advantage for competitive loan rates and rigorous screenings. Foreign banks, constrained by information friction, adopt a bottom-fishing approach, offering pricier loans with minimal screenings, often resulting in higher default rates. Using bank-level data of Korea, we provide empirical evidence of this market segmentation and discuss its policy implications.


Using a Dynamic Factor model on the U.S. household inflation expectations survey data of the NY Fed, I identify two primary components out of household inflation expectations: the Learning factor and the Long-run factor. The Learning factor is closely correlated with the number of inflation-related news articles published, while the Long-run factor is associated with energy prices. This suggests that households rely on easily accessible and prominent information when setting their inflation expectations. I use the systematic distinctions in responses between new and repeat respondents in the inflation expectations survey as the main source of identification for those two components.