You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 17 December 2025, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Tabea Bucher-Koenen (ZEW & University of Mannheim) will be talking about “Inflation Literacy, Inflation Expectations and Adjustments in Saving and Consumption Behavior of German Households”.
More information can be found here:
In 2022–2023, Germany and the euro area experienced unprecedentedly high inflation rates. This development has heightened the relevance of understanding what people know about inflation and how they seek to protect themselves against it. We examine households’ knowledge of inflation, its causes, its effects on debt and wealth, and strategies to hedge against it. To this end, we introduce a set of questions designed to comprehensively capture financial literacy and, in particular, inflation-related knowledge. Among others, we ask respondents from a representative sample of German households their perceptions of the impact of inflation on different asset classes. We further explore the mental models households have about inflation, thereby contributing to a growing strand of research on consumer narratives. Finally, we test whether knowledge about inflation translates into financial decisions by eliciting changes in households’ portfolios in response to the recent surge in inflation.