Research
Publications
Beliefs About the Economy are Excessively Sensitive to Household-Level Shocks: Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data
(with Luigi Butera, Chen Lian, and Dmitry Taubinsky)
Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
Abstract [PDF]
We study how people's beliefs about the economy covary with household-level events, utilizing a unique link between Danish administrative data and a large-scale survey of consumer expectations. We find that compared to actual inflation, people's inflation forecasts covary much more strongly (and negatively) with both recently realized household income changes and measures of expected future household income changes. We formally establish that these findings are stark deviations from the Bayesian rational expectations benchmark. Similar results hold for perceptions of past inflation ("backcasts"), suggesting that imperfect recall is a key mechanism for biased forecasts. Building on this, a series of additional tests, some of which utilize data on adverse health events, suggests that the forecast biases are at least partly due to affect-cued recall. That is, negative (positive) household-level events cue negative (positive) recollections, which lead to pessimistic (optimistic) forecasts.Working Papers
Geographic Price Extrapolation, Learning, and Housing Search: Evidence from Danish Movers
2026 American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association Best Junior Paper Prize
Abstract [PDF]
I show that homebuyers who move across cities extrapolate house price levels from their origin markets to their destination markets. Using population-wide Danish administrative registers on housing transactions, I document an asymmetric, hockey-stick relationship between origin prices and overpayment for comparable homes: moving one standard deviation down in the housing price distribution (i.e., from a more expensive to a cheaper area) yields a 3.1% quality-adjusted overpayment relative to local homebuyers; by contrast, among movers into more expensive markets, overpayment is small and unrelated to origin prices. I interpret these facts with a housing search model in which buyers arrive with origin-based price beliefs and learn at a common rate during search. Despite symmetric learning, endogenous stopping creates asymmetry at the time of purchase: buyers whose beliefs imply willingness to overpay are quickly accepted by sellers and transact before fully learning the local price level, whereas buyers whose beliefs imply underpaying face more rejections, search longer, and therefore converge toward local prices. The model delivers additional predictions that I test in the administrative data and in a survey. The evidence favors origin-price extrapolation with subsequent learning over preference-based explanations such as reference points.Does Family Caregiving Complement Formal Care? Daughters and Parental Survival After a Severe Health Shock
(with Elin Colmsjö and Francesco Ruggieri)
Abstract [PDF]
We study how informal family caregiving and formal care interact after severe parental health shocks, and whether they operate as substitutes or complements. Using Danish administrative data, we compare parents of only children who experience a stroke at the same age and differ only in the gender of their child. Before the stroke, parents of daughters and parents of sons follow similar health trajectories, with comparable levels of pre-existing conditions and healthcare utilization. After the stroke, a survival gap opens and grows, and parents of daughters are 1.5 percentage points more likely to be alive by year five. Over the same period, daughters adjust more than sons along several margins: they become more likely to live near their parents, less likely to be married, and have fewer children, consistent with greater involvement in informal caregiving. Crucially, parents of daughters use more physical rehabilitation, an elective type of formal care that requires sustained engagement. Rather than crowding out formal provision, daughters appear more likely to help parents navigate and use professional services. Informal and formal care can therefore operate, at least in part, as complements in the response to severe health shocks.In Progress
Beliefs, Misperceptions, and Household Balance Sheets: Evidence from Surveys and Administrative Data
(with Luigi Butera, Benjamin Lockwood, and Dmitry Taubinsky)
The Price of Simplicity: Measuring the Willingness to Pay to Simplify Taxes
(with Dominic Kassirra)
Pre-Doctoral Work
Socioeconomic Network Heterogeneity and Pandemic Policy Response
(with Mohammad Akbarpour, Cody Cook, Aude Marzuoli, Simon Mongey, Abhishek Nagaraj, Pietro Tebaldi, Shoshana Vasserman & Hanbin Yang)