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Working Paper
News and Uncertainty about COVID-19: Survey Evidence and Short-Run Economic Impact
A tailor-made survey documents consumer perceptions of the U.S. economy’s response to a large shock: the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey ran at a daily frequency between March 2020 and July 2021. Consumer perceptions regarding output and inflation react rapidly. Uncertainty is pervasive. A business-cycle model calibrated to the consumer views provides an interpretation. The rise in household uncertainty amplifies the pandemic recession by a factor of three. Different perceptions about monetary policy can explain why consumers and professional forecasters agree on the ...
Working Paper
We Are All Behavioral, More or Less: Measuring and Using Consumer-Level Behavioral Sufficient Statistics
Can a behavioral sufficient statistic empirically capture cross-consumer variation in behavioral tendencies and help identify whether behavioral biases, taken together, are linked to material consumer welfare losses? Our answer is yes. We construct simple consumer-level behavioral sufficient statistics??B-counts??by eliciting seventeen potential sources of behavioral biases per person, in a nationally representative panel, in two separate rounds nearly three years apart. B-counts aggregate information on behavioral biases within-person. Nearly all consumers exhibit multiple biases, in ...
Report
Should Mothers Work? How Perceptions of the Social Norm Affect Individual Attitudes Toward Work in the U.S.
We study how peer beliefs shape individual attitudes toward maternal labor supply using realistic hypothetical scenarios that elicit recommendations on the labor supply choices of a mother with a young child and an information treatment embedded within representative surveys. Across the scenarios, we find that individuals systematically overestimate the extent of gender conservativeness among the people around them. Exposure to information on peer beliefs leads to a shift in recommendations, driven largely by information-based belief updating. The information treatment also increases ...
Working Paper
Improved Estimation of Poisson Rate Distributions through a Multi-Mode Survey Design
Researchers interested in studying the frequency of events or behaviors among a population must rely on count data provided by sampled individuals. Often, this involves a decision between live event counting, such as a behavioral diary, and recalled aggregate counts. Diaries are generally more accurate, but their greater cost and respondent burden generally yield less data. The choice of survey mode, therefore, involves a potential tradeoff between bias and variance of estimators. I use a case study comparing inferences about payment instrument use based on different survey designs to ...
Working Paper
The Expectations of Others
Based on a framework of memory and recall that accounts for social networks, we provide conditions under which social networks can amplify expectations. We provide evidence for several predictions of the model using a novel dataset on inflation expectations and social network connections: Inflation expectations in the social network are statistically significantly, positively associated with individual inflation expectations; the relationship is stronger for groups that share common demographic characteristics, such as gender, income, or political affiliation. An instrumental variable ...
Working Paper
Reaching the Hard to Reach with Intermediaries: The Kansas City Fed’s LMI Survey
Reaching hard-to-reach individuals is a common problem in survey research. The low- and moderate-income (LMI) population, for example, is generally hard to reach. The Kansas City Fed?s Low- and Moderate-Income Survey addresses this problem by sampling a database of organizations to serve as proxies for the LMI population. In this paper, I describe why the LMI population can be hard to reach. I then explore potential problems with using a nonrandom survey sample and address the empirical validity of the Kansas City Fed?s LMI Survey. I compare results from the survey using the standard sample ...
Working Paper
Greater Than the Sum of the Parts: Aggregate vs. Aggregated Inflation Expectations
Using novel survey evidence on consumer inflation expectations disaggregated by personal consumption expenditure (PCE) categories, we document the paradox that consumers' aggregate inflation expectations usually exceed any individual category expectation. We explore procedures for aggregating category inflation expectations, and find that the inconsistency between aggregate and aggregated inflation expectations rises with subjective uncertainty and is systematically related to socioeconomic characteristics. Overall, our results are inconsistent with the notion that consumers' aggregate ...
Working Paper
Texas Service Sector Outlook Survey: Survey Methodology and Performance
The Texas Service Sector Outlook Survey (TSSOS) and Texas Retail Outlook Survey (TROS) are monthly surveys of service sector and retail firms in Texas conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. TSSOS and TROS track the Texas private services sector, including general service businesses, retailers and wholesalers. The surveys provide invaluable information on regional economic conditions?information that Dallas Fed economists and the Bank president use in the formulation of monetary policy. This paper describes the survey?s methodology and analyzes the explanatory and predictive power of ...
Working Paper
What Do Survey Data Tell Us about US Businesses?
This paper examines the reliability of survey data on business incomes, valuations, and rates of return, which are key inputs for studies of wealth inequality and entrepreneurial choice. We compare survey responses of business owners with available data from administrative tax records, brokered private business sales, and publicly traded company filings and document problems due to nonrepresentative samples and measurement errors across several surveys, subsamples, and years. We find that the discrepancies are economically relevant for the statistics of interest. We investigate reasons for ...
Working Paper
Modeling anchoring effects in sequential Likert scale questions
Surveys in many different research fields rely on sequences of Likert scale questions to assess individuals' general attitudes toward a set of related topics. Most analyses of responses to such a series do not take into account the potential measurement error introduced by the context effect we dub "sequential anchoring," which occurs when the rating for one question influences the rating given to the following question by favoring similar ratings. The presence of sequential anchoring can cause systematic bias in the study of relative ratings. We develop a latent-variable framework for ...