Public Debt Expectations: The More You Know about Public Debt, the Less Optimistic You Are

Abstract Macroeconomic expectations influence long-term output, investment, and employment through households’ behavior. Policymakers and politicians attempt to predict the behavior of citizens and voters. How individuals form expectations and perceive sovereign indebtedness brings into question public finance sustainability and incumbents’ credibility. Based on a cross-country survey in Central and Eastern European countries, we estimate several probit regressions to uncover the effects of economic knowledge on sovereign debt expectations. Robustness tests and additional control confirm the initial results. We find that knowledge about public debt increases the chances of forming negative expectations, while higher financial literacy tends to have the opposite effect. More specifically, individuals with higher public debt knowledge are 5.4 percentage points less likely to show positive expectations, while individuals with higher levels of financial literacy (interest rate and inflation knowledge) are approximately 3.5 percentage points more likely to form positive expectations. The results indicate that public debt expectations are driven by negative biases resulting from the lack of economic knowledge together with insufficiency in understanding economic causal mechanisms. Financial literacy programs could benefit from including information about macroeconomics in curricula. Improving individual abilities to understand macroeconomic mechanisms, including public debt, has the potential to influence expectations and shift behaviors towards desired policy outcomes.