Essays in Empirical Expectations

Abstract: This thesis investigates survey expectations from the Economic Tendency Survey for households, provided by the Swedish National Institute of Economic Research, for the years 1995-2011. The first chapter relates a part of the research literature to the overall purpose of the thesis, which is to investigate rational properties of empirical expectations. The second chapter presents the results of conventional linear tests of properties under the null of the Rational Expectations Hypothesis for different groups. Results conform to bad measures of inflation expectations and indicate that groups form expectations non-rationally. The third chapter presents the effects of the Swedish Riksbank’s repo rate press releases and adhering monetary policy reports on inflation expectations, which are asymmetric, significant, robust and non-persistent. The fourth chapter revisits stylized facts regarding entrepreneurs’ alleged irrational optimism, by using their 12 month expectations on the state of the Swedish economy as a proxy for optimism. We interpret the robust results as support for the argument that entrepreneurs have less of an optimism bias than non-entrepreneurs have a pessimism bias.