Perceived Unemployment Risks over Business Cycles

We backcast subjective expectations on job finding and separation in the Survey of Consumer Expectations to 1978, and use real-time machine learning forecasting to proxy their objective counterparts. We document stickiness in job finding and separation expectations in reflecting changes in real-time job finding and separation risks and their substantial heterogeneity across observable and unobservable dimensions. Calibrating these facts into a heterogeneous-agent consumption-saving model reveals that belief stickiness attenuates the precautionary saving channel. As a result, workers under-insure during recessions, leading to a more sluggish recovery afterwards. The combination of high risk exposure and under-insurance due to belief stickiness operates as a novel amplification mechanism over the business cycle.