Why Survey-Based Subjective Expectations Are Meaningful and Important
综述表明，家庭特征及其收集处理经济信息的方式能解释其主观预期看似令人困惑的事实，进而有助于理解家庭在消费、储蓄、投资和债务上的异质性选择以及对货币和财政政策的不同反应。
For decades, households’ subjective expectations elicited via surveys have been considered meaningless because they often differ substantially from the forecasts of professionals and ex-post realizations. In sharp contrast, the literature we review shows that household characteristics and the ways in which households collect and process economic information help us understand previously considered puzzling facts about their subjective expectations. In turn, subjective expectations contribute to explain heterogeneous consumption, saving, investment, and debt choices as well as different reactions by similar households to the same monetary and fiscal policy measures. Matching microdata on households’ characteristics with the price signals the same households observe, their subjective expectations, and their real-world economic decisions is crucial to establishing these facts. Our growing understanding of households’ subjective expectations inspires several theoretical and empirical research directions and begets the design of innovative and more effective policy instruments.