Artikel

Long-run expectations of households

The rational expectations assumption, e.g. in life-cycle models and portfolio-choice models, prescribes that all actions are in line with a well-structured and unbiased system of expectations. In reality, justification and identification of expectations are nontrivial, and we lack empirical evidence especially for the long run. This paper starts to fill this gap and elicits short-run and long-run expectations of a sample of households that is designed to be representative of the universe of German households. We focus on expectations about three highly welfare-relevant markets: the stock market, the labor market, and the housing market. We show that linear extrapolations of short-run expectations can approximate long-run expectations in the labor market, but not in financial or housing markets. In the latter two markets, long-run expectations of households are severely below linear price growth and far below historical values. This extreme pessimism does not extend to the labor market, where expectations are fairly close to historical values. We also document substantial heterogeneity of expectations by socio-economic and personal characteristics, e.g., females are more pessimistic than males about outcomes in all markets.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Journal: Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance ; ISSN: 2214-6369 ; Volume: 31 ; Year: 2021 ; Pages: -- ; Amsterdam: Elsevier

Classification
Wirtschaft
Household Saving; Personal Finance
Consumer Protection
Expectations; Speculations
Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
Subject
Long-run expectations
Biased beliefs
Returns to education

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Breunig, Christoph
Grabova, Iuliia
Haan, Peter
Weinhardt, Felix
Weizsäcker, Georg
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Elsevier
ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
(where)
Amsterdam
(when)
2021

DOI
doi:10.1016/j.jbef.2021.100535
Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:45 AM CET

Data provider

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ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.

Object type

  • Artikel

Associated

  • Breunig, Christoph
  • Grabova, Iuliia
  • Haan, Peter
  • Weinhardt, Felix
  • Weizsäcker, Georg
  • Elsevier
  • ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Time of origin

  • 2021

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