Johannes Wohlfart

The Lucas critique holds that policy evaluations based on historical correlations can fail because policy changes alter expectation formation. We develop a new approach to monetary policy evaluation that addresses this concern: we elicit expectations under alternative policy scenarios from household surveys and feed these measured expectations into a heterogeneous agent model. The surveys reveal that the response of income and inflation expectations to interest rate changes is state-dependent. Incorporating these expectation differences into the model yields estimates of the effects of policy on aggregate consumption that are state-dependent, varying with economic conditions at the time of the policy change.