On income expectations and other subjective data: A micro-econometric analysis

This thesis focuses on subjective data, in particular, answers to questions on income growth expectations. The emphasis is on the reliability and usefulness of subjective information. The data are from the Socio-Economic Panel (SEP), which is administered by Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and the VSB panel, which has been devised by researchers at CentER for Economic Research at Tilburg University. Using the panel nature of the SEP, expectations about income growth were compared with corresponding realizations. In addition to the empirical analyses of income growth expectations and uncertainty about future income, attention was paid to some methodological aspects of ordered categorical data.