Jochen Streb - Böcker

An empirical analysis and new theoretical framework for understanding economic expectations and decision-making in different historical settings.Expectations play a crucial role in shaping economic behavior. But how are expectations actually formed, and how has this changed over time? The financial crisis of 2007–08 cast doubt on traditional theories of expectation formation, particularly the rational expectations framework. In Contingent Expectations, Alexander Nützenadel and Jochen Streb examine the ways that past experiences influence the economic expectations and decision-making of households, investors, and policymakers through history, and offer an alternative perspective. Combining a comprehensive empirical analysis of expectation formation from the eighteenth century to the present day with an assessment of the relevant economic theory, Nützenadel and Streb present a new theoretical framework, contingent expectations, for understanding economic expectation.Nützenadel and Streb show how economic actors developed new forecasting methods in response to rising uncertainty brought on by the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of global trade, financial market integration, and environmental crises. Tracing the evolution of economic theories on expectations, they find that when growing market volatility made forecasting more complex, economic agents often adapted with remarkable flexibility to changing circumstances. Challenging prevailing concepts of expectations, including rational choice and adaptive expectations, Nützenadel and Streb emphasize the heterogeneity of economic agents’ cognitive practices—in particular, the need to consider variation in information costs and historical experience. Expectation formation, they argue, is contingent on each individual’s current decision-making situation. Their account of the history of economic expectations has significant implications for current debates in economics.

The Routledge Handbook of Economic Expectations in Historical Perspective offers a one-stop reference that distills and summarizes the recent scholarship on economic expectations. Investigating the dynamics, effects, and determinants of economic expectations from a global perspective since the seventeenth century, this book enhances the understanding of expectation formation across time and space.Expectations drive economic decision-making and thus offer a fundamental key to understanding economic behavior. Given the centrality of economics to society, the historical study of economic expectations is a highly relevant endeavor, for which this volume provides an accessible starting point. Featuring 33 chapters written by leading scholars from fields ranging from anthropology to political science, this handbook provides a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective. Together, the collection of essays argues that the development of economic theory and empirical research on expectation formation has not taken place in a vacuum. Rather, it must be understood as one strand in a complex entanglement of knowledge production, experiences, and economic and political decision-making, which interacted with, challenged, and transformed each other.With its broad scope, this handbook will be of interest to students and scholars across multiple disciplines, including economic history, economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science.