Intrahousehold Disagreement about Macroeconomic Expectations

Abstract

This paper highlights the simple fact that households typically consist of multiple members who may hold divergent views, a fact that existing approaches to measuring and modeling household macroeconomic expectations largely abstract from. Using unique data on the macroeconomic expectations of both spouses, I document substantial intrahousehold disagreement about inflation, economic recessions, and stock market returns. I further show that household asset allocation decisions are shaped by disagreement between spouses about future stock returns, and a preregistered randomized survey experiment confirms the causal impact of such disagreement on portfolio choice.