Consumer Expectations

Consumer Expectations
Author: Richard Thomas Curtin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-02-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108576931

Richard Curtin has directed the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment surveys for more than four decades. His analyses of recent trends in consumer expectations are regularly covered in the worldwide press. In this book, Curtin presents a new theory of expectations. Whereas conventional theories presume that consumers play a passive role in the macro economy, simply reacting to current trends in incomes, prices, and interest rates, Curtin proposes a new empirically consistent theory. He argues that expectations are formed by an automatic process that utilizes conscious and nonconscious processes, passion and reason, information from public and private sources, and social networks. Consumers ultimately reach a decision that serves both the micro decision needs of individuals and reflects the common influence of the macro environment. Drawing on empirical observations, Curtin not only demonstrates the importance of consumer sentiment, but also how it can foreshadow the cyclical turning points in the economy.

Learning and Expectations in Macroeconomics

Learning and Expectations in Macroeconomics
Author: George W. Evans
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2012-01-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400824265

A crucial challenge for economists is figuring out how people interpret the world and form expectations that will likely influence their economic activity. Inflation, asset prices, exchange rates, investment, and consumption are just some of the economic variables that are largely explained by expectations. Here George Evans and Seppo Honkapohja bring new explanatory power to a variety of expectation formation models by focusing on the learning factor. Whereas the rational expectations paradigm offers the prevailing method to determining expectations, it assumes very theoretical knowledge on the part of economic actors. Evans and Honkapohja contribute to a growing body of research positing that households and firms learn by making forecasts using observed data, updating their forecast rules over time in response to errors. This book is the first systematic development of the new statistical learning approach. Depending on the particular economic structure, the economy may converge to a standard rational-expectations or a "rational bubble" solution, or exhibit persistent learning dynamics. The learning approach also provides tools to assess the importance of new models with expectational indeterminacy, in which expectations are an independent cause of macroeconomic fluctuations. Moreover, learning dynamics provide a theory for the evolution of expectations and selection between alternative equilibria, with implications for business cycles, asset price volatility, and policy. This book provides an authoritative treatment of this emerging field, developing the analytical techniques in detail and using them to synthesize and extend existing research.

Inflation Expectations

Inflation Expectations
Author: Peter J. N. Sinclair
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2009-12-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1135179778

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

Handbook of Economic Expectations

Handbook of Economic Expectations
Author: Ruediger Bachmann
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 876
Release: 2022-11-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0128234768

Handbook of Economic Expectations discusses the state-of-the-art in the collection, study and use of expectations data in economics, including the modelling of expectations formation and updating, as well as open questions and directions for future research. The book spans a broad range of fields, approaches and applications using data on subjective expectations that allows us to make progress on fundamental questions around the formation and updating of expectations by economic agents and their information sets. The information included will help us study heterogeneity and potential biases in expectations and analyze impacts on behavior and decision-making under uncertainty. - Combines information about the creation of economic expectations and their theories, applications and likely futures - Provides a comprehensive summary of economics expectations literature - Explores empirical and theoretical dimensions of expectations and their relevance to a wide array of subfields in economics

The Theory of Rational Expectations and Its Applications in Accounting

The Theory of Rational Expectations and Its Applications in Accounting
Author: Norton M. Bedford
Publisher:
Total Pages: 92
Release: 1978
Genre: Accounting
ISBN:

The Theory of Rational Expectation assumes all information relevant to an economic decision is compounded into the market. The information set is assumed to be comprehensive, extending well beyond traditional accounting information. Holding that price is set by the interaction of all public information available in any point in time, the Rational Expectation Hypothesis questions traditional accounting time series analyses that predict future prices by extrapolating from past accounting data. The implications of the Rational Expectation Hypothesis (REH) to accounting are as follows: (1) An expanded income statement should be provided. (2) Accounting information systems should cover larger data base systems. (3) The cost and value of alternative accounting information should be provided. (4) The general price level adjustment should be made. (5) Accounting information should assume that governmental policies cannot control the economy as precisely as desired. (6) Detailed information on risk alternatives should be disclosed. (7) Research is needed to determine the circumstances under which a larger information set will be relevant for forming rational expectations.

A Structural Analysis of Expectation Formation

A Structural Analysis of Expectation Formation
Author: Marc Ivaldi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3642467350

Using panel data of individual firms drawn from French surveys, a structural analysis is developed to study the formation of production plans and the rationality of expectations. The production decision of a firm is defined as the optimal solution of a dynamic stochastic optimization problem. The empirical work amounts to recovering the structural parameters characterizing the model of the firm from estimates of the derived decision rule. The preceding analysis of production plans is based on the assumption that firms are rational. To justify this assumption, direct tests offer evidence that the Rational Expectations Hypothesis may not be rejected for quantity variables.

Learning in Economic Systems with Expectations Feedback

Learning in Economic Systems with Expectations Feedback
Author: Jan Wenzelburger
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2006-09-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3540380507

Recently economists have more and more focussed on scenarios in which agents' views of the world may be erroneous. These notes introduce the concept of perfect forecasting rules which provide best least-squares predictions along the evolution of an economic system. The framework for nonparametric adaptive learning schemes is developed and it is argued that plausible learning schemes should aim at estimating a perfect forecasting rule taking into account the correct feedback structure of an economy. A link is provided between the traditional rational-expectations view and recent behavioristic approaches.