This paper provides novel empirical evidence on portfolio rebalancing in international bond markets through the prism of investors’ demand for bonds. Using a granular dataset of global government and corporate bond holdings by mutual funds domiciled in the world’s two largest currency areas, I estimate heterogeneous and time varying demand elasticities for bonds. Safe assets such as US Treasuries or German Bunds face especially inelastic demand from investment funds compared to riskier bonds. But spillovers from these safe assets to global bond markets are strikingly different.

I study how demand-supply narrative disagreement between general and specialized newspapers can explain households’ absolute gap in inflation expectations with experts. I measure inflation narratives via a Causality Extraction algorithm that can identify causal relationships between events in a text and, hence, extract the perceived triggers of inflation. Causal relations can explain why narratives affect people’s beliefs and cannot be captured by dictionary methods, topic models, and word embeddings.

The scores aimed to predict a property’s risk from fires, floods and storms, but some in the real estate industry as well as homeowners have called them inaccurate.

Data on spending this week shows that consumers are shopping big for the holidays despite inflation and economic worries.