The Effects of Biased Labor Market Expectations on Consumption, Wealth Inequality, and Welfare (with Almut Balleer, Georg Duernecker, and Susanne Forstner), American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2026
Idiosyncratic labor market risk is a prevalent phenomenon with important implications for individual choices. In labor market research it is commonly assumed that agents have rational expectations and therefore correctly assess the risk they face in the labor market. We analyze survey data for the U.S. and document a substantial optimistic bias of households in their subjective expectations about future labor market transitions. Furthermore, we investigate the heterogeneity in the bias across different demographic groups and we find that low-skilled individuals tend to be strongly over-optimistic about their labor market prospects, whereas high-skilled individuals have rather precise beliefs. In the context of a quantitative heterogeneous agents life cycle model we show that the optimistic bias has a sizable negative effect on the life cycle allocation of income, consumption and wealth and implies a substantial loss in individual welfare compared to the allocation under full information. Moreover, we establish that the heterogeneity in the bias leads to pronounced differences in the accumulation of assets across individuals, and is thereby a quantitatively important driver of inequality in wealth.
Worker Mobility and UI Extensions (with Andreas Gulyas and Ioannis Kospentaris), European Economic Review, 2024
We develop an equilibrium search model with a labor force participation decision, job-to-job transitions, and endogenous separations. The calibrated model perfectly matches the observed labor market flows in US data. We use the model to simulate the effects of an extension of unemployment insurance benefits to 99 weeks. The reform leads to a decrease in employment, an increase in the labor force participation and unemployment rate, while it leaves labor productivity roughly constant. Using a model-based decomposition, as well as comparisons with alternative simplified models, we show that modeling workers’ participation decisions, job-to-job transitions, and endogenous separations together is crucial for a complete and accurate analysis of UI reforms.
Biased Expectations and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from German Survey Data and Implications for the East-West Wage Gap (with Almut Balleer, Georg Duernecker, and Susanne Forstner) (December 2025) Journal of Monetary Economics, accepted
CEPR Discussion Paper 18005
We measure individual bias in labor market expectations in German survey data and find that workers on average significantly overestimate their individual probabilities to separate from their job when employed as well to find a job when unemployed. These biases vary significantly between population groups. Most notably, East Germans are significantly more pessimistic than West Germans. We find a significantly negative elationship between the pessimistic bias in job separation expectations and wages, and a significantly positive relationship between optimistic bias in job finding expectations and reservation incomes. We interpret and quantify the effects of (such) expectation biases on the labor market equilibrium in a search and matching model of the labor market. Removing the biases could substantially increase wages and expected lifetime income in East Germany. The bias difference in labor market expectations explains part of the East-West German wage gap.
Non-Convergence of East German Wages: Effects of Skill Shortage on Firm Organization (February 2025) International Economic Review, reject & resubmit
Why have average labor productivity and real wages not converged between East and West Germany after reunification? Documenting a diverging relative supply of high-skilled workers, I propose a new explanation for this puzzle: In the presence of fewer high-skilled workers, East German firms operate under a different organization of production, stay smaller, are less productive, and pay lower wages. Exploiting rich, administrative datasets, I document a positive relation between the size and the share of high-skilled workers in an establishment, as well as positive semi-elasticities regarding wages for both worker types and regions controlling for observables. Using a general equilibrium model with large firms operating in a frictional labor market, implies that over 26% of the wage gap after controlling for on worker and job characteristics between East and West Germany in 2015 can be explained by the lower relative supply of high skilled workers. The model also predicts that output would increase by 20% if East Germany had the same relative supply of workers as West Germany.
Causal Effects of Interest Rate Beliefs on Firm Decisions and their Macroeconomic Implications (with Alina Bartscher, Georg Duernecker, and Nils Wehrhöfer) (January 2026)
We study firms’ financial and real decisions after an exogenous change in their interest rate beliefs induced by a survey experiment with an information treatment. Firms revise their expectations downward after learning about the European Central Bank’s policy rate. Moreover, we find a reduction in interest rate uncertainty. We link the survey to credit register data and find that treated firms both increase their loan amounts and shift their loan structure toward longer-term, fixed-rate credit with lower interest rates. Using balance sheet data, we also show that treated f irms invest more following the RCT. These effects are driven by small firms. We rationalize our findings in a stylized model of firms with imperfect information about the interest rate.
Wage Bargaining and Labor Market Policy with Biased Expectations (with Almut Balleer, Georg Duernecker, and Susanne Forstner) (October 2023)
CEPR Discussion Paper 18019
Recent research documents mounting evidence for sizable and persistent biases in individual labor market expectations. This paper incorporates subjective expectations into a general equilibrium labor market model and analytically studies the implications of biased expectations for wage bargaining, vacancy creation, worker flows and labor market policies. Importantly, we find that under the widely used period-by-period Nash bargaining protocol, the model generates a counterfactual relationship between workers’ job separation expectations and wages. Instead, a wage setting process with less frequent wage renegotiations is found to be empirically consistent. Moreover, we show that the presence of biased beliefs can qualitatively alter the equilibrium effects of labor market policies.
Female Financial Portfolio Choices and Marital Property Regimes (with Lidia Cruces, Isabel Micó-Millán, and Susana Parraga Rodriguez)