Income expectations during the lockdown: evidence from a student survey

We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ perception of future economic conditions. Our results show that students’ perception of the current situation is a strong predictor of future expectations. Moreover, students whose parents are self-employed seem to be more concerned about the future. We also detect that an increase in anxiety due to the pandemic and lockdown leads to negative expectations. We find that students seem to anticipate the long run effects of the pandemic by having increasingly pessimistic expectations about the future. This appears to be in line with both rational expectation theory, in which they consider the current situation as a signal for long-run decrease of future expectations, and at the same time, with adaptive expectation schemes anchored by their knowledge on historical pandemic situations.