The Behavioral Economics of Inflation Expectations

This book offers a modern behavioral economics analysis of macroeconomic expectations, using cognitive psychology and a bottom-up approach to economic expectations. It gives students and researchers a quantitative model for analyzing inflation, interest rates and business cycle phenomena for any country or historical period.

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As one of the first texts to take a behavioral approach to macroeconomic expectations, this book introduces a new way of doing economics. Rötheli uses cognitive psychology in a bottom-up method of modeling macroeconomic expectations. His research is based on laboratory experiments and historical data, which he extends to real-world situations. Pattern extrapolation is shown to be the key to understanding expectations of inflation and income. The quantitative model of expectations is used to analyze the course of inflation and nominal interest rates in a range of countries and historical periods. The model of expected income is applied to the analysis of business cycle phenomena such as the great recession in the United States. Data and spreadsheets are provided for readers to do their own computations of macroeconomic expectations. This book offers new perspectives in many areas of macro and financial economics.