Georgarakos Dimitris, Kenny Geoff
Directorate General Research, European Central Bank, 60640 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
J Monet Econ. 2022 Jul;129:S1-S14. doi: 10.1016/j.jmoneco.2022.02.007. Epub 2022 Feb 25.
This paper introduces the Consumer Expectations Survey (CES), a new online, high frequency panel survey of euro area consumers' expectations and behaviour. The paper also investigates whether public perceptions about fiscal support measures introduced during the pandemic have influenced spending behaviour. We show that simple and factual information treatments about government support policies that are communicated to random subsets of respondents can help improve consumers' perceptions about the adequacy of fiscal interventions relative to that of an untreated control group. We find evidence that this improvement in beliefs has a causal effect on consumer spending, in particular raising spending on large items like holidays and cars. Moreover, we show that such beliefs influence household expectations about own income prospects, future access to credit and financial sentiment, while they do not affect expectations about future taxes, implying no evidence of Ricardian effects in household behaviour. We find that perceptions affect spending also amongst households that did not receive any government support, suggesting that fiscal interventions can have broader consequences as they influence the behaviour of groups beyond the targeted ones.
本文介绍了消费者预期调查（CES），这是一项针对欧元区消费者预期和行为的全新在线高频面板调查。本文还研究了公众对疫情期间推出的财政支持措施的看法是否影响了消费行为。我们表明，向随机抽取的受访者子集传达的关于政府支持政策的简单事实性信息处理，有助于改善消费者对财政干预充足性的看法，相对于未接受处理的对照组而言。我们发现有证据表明，这种信念的改善对消费者支出有因果影响，特别是增加了在度假和汽车等大件商品上的支出。此外，我们表明，这种信念会影响家庭对自身收入前景、未来信贷获取和金融情绪的预期，而不会影响对未来税收的预期，这意味着没有证据表明家庭行为中存在李嘉图效应。我们发现，在没有获得任何政府支持的家庭中，看法也会影响支出，这表明财政干预可能会产生更广泛的影响，因为它们会影响目标群体之外的其他群体的行为。
