Does Policy Communication during COVID-19 Work?

Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Michael Weber

No 13355, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Using a large-scale survey of U.S. households during the Covid-19 pandemic, we study how new information about fiscal and monetary policy responses to the crisis affects households' expectations. We provide random subsets of participants in the Nielsen Homescan panel with different combinations of information about the severity of the pandemic, recent actions by the Federal Reserve, stimulus measures, as well as recommendations from health officials. This experiment allows us to assess to what extent these policy announcements alter the beliefs and spending plans of households. In short, they do not, contrary to the powerful effects they have in standard macroeconomic models.

Keywords: subjective expectations; fiscal policy; monetary policy; COVID-19; surveys (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C83 D84 E31 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-hea, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13355.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp13355

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().