Using Expectations Data to Study Subjective Income Expectations

Abstract We have collected data on the one-year-ahead income expectations of members of American households in our survey of economic expectations (SEE), a module of a national continuous telephone survey conducted at the University of Wisconsin. The income-expectations questions take this form: “What do you think is the percent chance (or what are the chances out of 100) that your total household income, before taxes, will be less than Y over the next 12 months?” We use the responses to a sequence of such questions posed for different income thresholds Y to estimate each respondent's subjective probability distribution for next year's household income. We use the estimates to study the cross-sectional variation in income expectations one year into the future. We find that the estimated subjective interquartile range (IQR) of future income tends to rise with the estimated subjective median, but more slowly than proportionately. There is substantial variation in the estimated subjective IQR among responden...

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