Information and Macroeconomic Expectations: Global Evidence

Francesco D’Acunto and Michael Weber

No 35511, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Unique global data on 47,000 consumers across 47 countries representing 90% of world GDP reveal universal patterns in macroeconomic belief formation. Most consumers form beliefs based on local information sources (utility bills, shopping, and acquaintances) that provide signals not representative for the overall consumption bundle, so that seeking information leads to forming biased macroeconomic expectations. Distrust in governments and central banks, the producers of aggregate economic information, helps explain reliance on local sources and the lack of learning from aggregate realizations. Observed macroeconomic volatility fuels distrust. In the cross-section, we confirm that certain demographics correlate with expectation biases but mostly due to different sorting into information sources, rather than different processing of the same economic information. These globally established facts inform advances of theories of belief formation and the design of communication strategies as a macroeconomic policy tool.

JEL-codes: C90 D14 D84 E31 E52 E71 G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07
Note: AP EFG ME
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35511.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:35511

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35511
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().