Expectation, Anticipation, and Identification: Essays on Subjective Expectations and Economic Decision‐Making

Over the past three decades, economists have progressively undertaken to elicit probabilistic expectations related to significant personal events from survey respondents (Manski, 2004). This practice of measuring individual-specific subjective expectations has offered researchers various opportunities because data on subjective expectations can be used to relax and validate certain assumptions that are critical to economic analysis.
This thesis consists of three chapters, in which we explore the use of subjective expectations in understanding economic decisions of the elderly population. The theme of these chapters revolves around proposing various modeling and estimation strategies that leverage self-elicited probabilities to enhance existing empirical methods.