Working papers
Working papers
(with Alessia Russo, Eleonora Granziera, Efrem Castelnuovo)
We investigate how education shapes households' macroeconomic beliefs by surveying Dutch households on their perceptions and forecasts of inflation, unemployment, mortgage rates, and stock prices. Our findings unveil significant differences between highly-educated and less-educated households. Highly educated respondents form beliefs consistent with a monetary policy trade-off between inflation and unemployment, whereas less-educated households adopt a "supply-side" perspective. When exposed to vignette-based scenarios simulating monetary policy shocks, highly educated individuals adjust their beliefs and consumption-saving decisions in line with intertemporal substitution and textbook economic models. In contrast, less-educated respondents often retain pre-existing beliefs or revise them using non-standard mental models. Moreover, highly educated households primarily rely on formal education and newspapers for economic information, while less-educated households are more influenced by social media. These findings point to the need to model education-related heterogeneity and communicate policy targets and decisions in a simplified manner to reach different socio-economic groups.
Presented at: Women in Macro workshop (Trinity College Dublin); Naples Workshop on Frontiers in Measurement and Survey Methods (Università Federico II Naples); Conference on Theories and Methods in Macroeconomics (CREST Paris); EAYE Annual Meeting 2025 (King’s College London); CEPR workshop on Beliefs and the Macroeconomy (UcLouvain); Summer Forum on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics (BSE Barcelona); Politecnico di Milano Workshop on Inflation; Padova Workshop of Macroeconomic Expectations; Workshop on Heterogeneous Macro Expectations (FAU Nuremberg).
(with Yuriy Gorodnichenko)
Submitted
This paper examines how homeownership status shapes attention to inflation and its impact on durable consumption. Using randomized controlled trials on U.S. households (2021–2023), we document systematic heterogeneity in responses to inflation-related information. Homeowners exhibit greater baseline awareness and update their expectations less than renters, who respond more strongly due to lower prior knowledge. Exploiting exogenous variation in inflation expectations induced by the treatments, we find that homeowners adjust durable spending significantly, whereas renters do not. These results highlight homeownership as a key factor in the formation of inflation expectations and their influence on economic behavior.
Accepted for presentation at: ifo Conference on Macroeconomics and Survey data (ifo institure), WE_ARE_IN Macroeconomics and Finance conference (ECB). Presented at: UC Berkeley Graduate Macro Symposium fall 2024 (UC Berkeley), Padova Macro talks 2025 (University of Padova).