Narratives about the Macroeconomy

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Andre, Peter; Haaland, Ingar; Roth, Christopher; Wiederholt, Mirko; Wohlfart, Johannes
• 署名单位: Goethe University Frankfurt; Norwegian School of Economics (NHH); Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU); University of Cologne; University of Munich
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMIC STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6527
• DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdag014
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: expectations; INFORMATION; DISAGREEMENT; CONVERGENCE

摘要

We study narratives about the macroeconomy-the stories people tell to explain macroeconomic phenomena-in the context of a historic surge in inflation. In our empirical analysis, we field surveys with more than 10,000 U.S. households and 100 academic experts, measure economic narratives in open-ended questions, and represent them as directed acyclic graphs. Households' narratives are strongly heterogeneous, coarser than experts' narratives, focus more on the supply than the demand side, and often feature politically charged explanations. Moreover, narratives shape how households form inflation expectations and interpret new information, which we demonstrate in a series of experiments. Informed by these findings, our theoretical analysis incorporates narratives into an otherwise conventional New Keynesian model and demonstrates their importance for aggregate outcomes through their effect on agents' expectations.