American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Economic Experts versus Average Americans
American Economic Review
vol. 103,
no. 3, May 2013
(pp. 636–42)
Abstract
We compare answers to policy questions by economic experts and a representative sample of the US population. We find a 35 percentage point difference between the two groups. This gap is only partially explained by differences in ideological or personal characteristics of the two samples. Interestingly, the difference is the largest on the questions where economists agree the most and where there is the largest amount of literature. Informing people of the expert opinions does not seem to have much of an impact. Ordinary people seem to be skeptical of the implicit assumptions embedded into the economists' answers.Citation
Sapienza, Paola, and Luigi Zingales. 2013. "Economic Experts versus Average Americans." American Economic Review, 103 (3): 636–42. DOI: 10.1257/aer.103.3.636Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- A11 Role of Economics; Role of Economists
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design