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Working Paper
Earnings Misperceptions and Household Distress
Households learn whether income changes are temporary or persistent from the history of their own paychecks. This paper develops a quantitative model of household financial distress that incorporates this inference and uses survey data on income expectations to estimate the extent to which households overweight recent outcomes—diagnostic expectations. The model improves on the standard full-information, rational-expectations benchmark in two key dimensions: it explains financial distress without assuming extreme impatience, and it more accurately captures the empirical correlation between ...