Economic Experts versus Average Americans
Paola Sapienza, Luigi Zingales
American Economic Review · 2013 · Volume 103 · Issue 3
Abstract
We compare answers to policy questions by economic experts and a representative sample of the US population. We find a 35 percentage point difference between the two groups. This gap is only partially explained by differences in ideological or personal characteristics of the two samples. Interestingly, the difference is the largest on the questions where economists agree the most and where there is the largest amount of literature. Informing people of the expert opinions does not seem to have much of an impact. Ordinary people seem to be skeptical of the implicit assumptions embedded into the economists' answers.
Keywords
Role of Economics, Role of Economists, Asymmetric and Private Information, Mechanism Design
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