Olivier Coibion

Coibion is widely recognized for using large-scale survey data from sources such as the Michigan Survey of Consumers to study how households and firms form expectations about future inflation. His research demonstrated that household inflation expectations systematically diverge from professional forecasts in ways that standard rational expectations models cannot explain.

Coibion is a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. His primary research fields are macroeconomics and monetary policy, with a particular focus on expectation formation and information frictions.

In joint research published in the American Economic Review in 2012, Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko provided evidence of information rigidity in professional macroeconomic forecasts, showing that forecasters update their predictions sluggishly in response to new data. Their findings supported models of sticky information and rational inattention in macroeconomic theory.

Coibion's most frequent collaborator is Yuriy Gorodnichenko of the University of California, Berkeley, with whom he has published extensively on inflation expectations, monetary policy transmission, and the role of information in macroeconomic decisions. Their joint work has helped establish survey-based expectations as a mainstream tool in macroeconomic research.