In a widely cited article, Shiller (1997) found that the public dislikes inflation to a greater extent than economists-and dislikes inflation for different reasons. We fielded a contemporary version of Shiller's survey to consider how economists' and the public's views on inflation have changed over time. We find that, in some respects, economists' views on inflation more closely resemble those of the public in our survey than was originally reported by Shiller (1997). But important differences remain.
This paper develops a one-period behavioral model of price aggregation in social networks. Investors combine noisy private signals with a centrality-weighted social feed. In the equalprecision benchmark, pricing error is summarized by M = σ 2 H, where H is the Herfindahl concentration of equilibrium signal weights. Greater centrality amplification increases H in non-uniform networks, reducing price informativeness. A Gaussian projection implies larger one-period corrections when pricing error is greater. With heterogeneous precision, centrality-based attention is efficient if and only if visibility weights align with precision weights. The model links network concentration to fragile price discovery.
We study whether ideology can overturn the income-based prediction of redistribution preferences. Using individual-level data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, we compare two cross-pressured groups: poor right-wing and rich left-wing respondents. Rich-left respondents are significantly more supportive of redistribution than poor-right respondents, including within country-wave cells. The findings provide global evidence that ideology can reverse the income-based ranking of preferences for redistribution.
