DGPE PhD course: Subjective Beliefs in Macroeconomics and Household Finance

Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI) and Department of Economics offer a five-day course on the empirical study of expectation formation in macroeconomics and finance. The course consists of a 3-days teaching block and attendance of a 2-days research workshop with internal and external speakers.

A large part of of our course introduces students to the new emerging literature studying expectation formation of firms and consumers using experimental methods. However, we will also discuss the use of observational data, such as data from existing household surveys, and the use of high frequency data as well as textual analysis to better understand expectation formation.

Topics include the formation of expectations about inflation, GDP growth, house prices and stock returns. Moreover, we discuss the role of expectations in shaping economic and financial behavior of households and firms. Part of the course will focus on central bank communication and its role in expectation formation.