Using Expectations Data to Study Subjective Income Expectations

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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 for one year into the future.

Published: JASA, Vol. 92, no. 439 (September 1997): 855-867.

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