Essays on subjective expectations and mortality trends

This thesis consists of four chapters on two topics. The first topic, covered in chapter 2, 3, and 4, is about subjective expectations. Economists have long understood that expectations are important determinants of economic decisions. However, expectations are rarely observed. One way to overcome the problem is to elicit beliefs of individuals, or so-called subjective expectations, directly from survey questions. The three chapters study directly measured expectations on two important assets: housing and stock. Home ownership is very high in many countries and housing is typically the largest asset in most households' portfolios. Stock is often the major component of households' financial wealth. Chapter 2 investigates how house price expectations are related to macro and micro characteristics. Chapter 3 focuses on stock price expectations. Both chapters are based on panel data analysis of individual expectations at the micro level. Chapter 4 is also about house price expectations, but is from a macroeconomic perspective and relies on time series analysis of aggregate data. The second topic, discussed in Chapter 5, is about mortality trends. This chapter introduces a mortality forecasting model, which links mortality trends to trends in economic growth, and studies mortality dynamics for six developed countries.