https://macropaperwarehouse.com/authors/mirko-wiederholt/Mirko WiederholtHugo -- gohugo.ioen-ushttps://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/narratives-about-the-macroeconomy/https://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/narratives-about-the-macroeconomy/<p><strong>Research Question</strong></p> <p>This paper investigates two related empirical questions in the context of the historic surge in US inflation in late 2021 and 2022: (1) What narratives—causal stories—do people invoke to explain why inflation increased? (2) How do those narratives shape economic expectations? A companion theoretical component asks how narrative heterogeneity affects aggregate macroeconomic outcomes.</p> <p><strong>Data and Methodology</strong></p> <p>The authors recruit more than 10,000 US households across five descriptive survey waves (November 2021, December 2021, January 2022, March 2022, May 2022) via Lucid, plus a separate expert survey of 111 academic economists with JEL-E publications in top journals, recruited simultaneously with the November 2021 household wave. Household samples are broadly representative of the US population in terms of gender, age, region, and income. The expert sample is highly credentialed: on average 18.6 years post-PhD, 2.7 top-five publications, and 5,534 Google Scholar citations.</p>