Schumpeter Lecture 2025: The New Causal Macroeconomics of Surveys and Experiments

Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko

Journal of the European Economic Association, 2026, vol. 24, issue 1, 58-81

Abstract: We discuss how randomized control trials (RCTs) can be used to study the causal effects of expectations on the decisions of households, firms, and other economic agents. Specifically, information provision in RCTs can create exogenous variation in the beliefs of survey participants and thus can address a key identification challenge that has plagued research efforts focused on understanding the role of expectations in shaping economic decisions. When linked to either external information on their actions or subsequent survey waves that measure their ex-post decisions, RCTs can provide clear causal identification of the passthrough from expectations to decisions. We review recent evidence using this strategy and discuss potential challenges associated with this approach.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeea/jvaf050 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jeurec:v:24:y:2026:i:1:p:58-81.

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the European Economic Association is currently edited by Romain Wacziarg

More articles in Journal of the European Economic Association from European Economic Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().