What Does the Public Know about Economic Policy, and How Does It Know It?

By Alan S. Blinder, Alan B. Krueger. Social Science Research Network, 2004

292 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Public opinion influences politicians, and therefore influences public policy decisions. What are the roles of self-interest, knowledge, and ideology in public opinion formation? And how do people learn about economic issues? Using a new, specially-designed survey, we find that most respondents express a strong desire to be well informed on economic policy issues, and that television is their dominant source of information. On a variety of major policy issues (e.g., taxes, social security, health insurance), ideology is the most important determinant of public opinion, while measures of self-interest are the least important. Knowledge about the economy ranks somewhere in between.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fcede7773969958862ace458dbc1e33508f1f967

Citations in the corpus

• Man-Bites-Dog Business Cycles (2014, unknown): “The bottom panel also includes indices for the fraction of respondents that have heard any unfavorable (red dashed line) or any favorable (green dotted line) news about the economy.(7) It is clear that the unfavorable news heard index increases around recessions and around the stock market crash in ”
• Does information increase political support for pension reform? (2010, unknown): “The important role of ideology in explaining policy opinions is consistent with the results of Blinder and Krueger (2004) for the US.”
• The Role of Media for Inflation Forecast Disagreement of Households and Professionals (2012, unknown): “The important role of the media for belief formation is underlined by Blinder and Krueger (2004).”
• Consumer sentiment, the economy, and the news media (2004, unknown): “Blinder and Krueger (2004) find that most popular source of information about economic information is television, followed by newspapers.”
• What's Behind "Inflation Perceptions"? A Survey-Based Analysis of Italian Consumers (2008, unknown): “An analysis of consumers’ ability to understand and interpret correctly inflation statistics is important per se, as economic theory generally assumes that economic policy decisions are taken as solutions to optimization problems solved by rational and well-informed agents (Blinder and Krueger, 2004”
• Does the World Economy Swing National Elections (2009, unknown): “Similarly, Blinder and Krueger (2004) find that economic literacy among those who primarily use newspapers is substantially higher than among those who get most of their information from television.”
• News on Inflation and the Epidemiology of Inflation Expectations (2013, unknown): “Blinder and Krueger (2004) suggest that consumers mostly rely on information about inflation from the TV, followed by local and then national newspapers.11 It is also plausible to expect that the volume of news about inflation does not necessarily match the flow of information that is actually…”
• Interest Rate Expectations in the Media and Central Bank Communication (2013, unknown): “In a survey of a random sample of the U.S. population, Blinder and Krueger (2004) identify television and newspapers as the two most important sources of economic information.”