Lena Dräger

Government Pandemic Responses

In a recent project using new data from an online survey with households in Thailand and Vietnam during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Lena Dräger and her co-authors evaluated how consumers respond to randomly provided information about others’ beliefs in cross-country surveys on how well their governments responded to the pandemic. In the paper, the researchers analyze the impact of this type of information on consumers’ own beliefs and on their optimism or pessimism regarding the expected economic climate (consumer sentiment).

Ms. Dräger’s research focuses on topics in monetary macroeconomics and household finance. Many of her recent papers make use of micro data from household surveys and survey experiments to analyze the formation of macroeconomic expectations by consumers and the implications for households’ consumption and saving decisions as well as for monetary policy guidance and communication.

During her research stay at the ifo Institute, Ms. Dräger will work with the Business Surveys Department to evaluate the business-specific and macroeconomic expectations included in the survey at the individual firm level. In addition, she plans to continue her research on recent projects with household survey data.

Lena Dräger is a full Professor of Economics, especially Money and International Finance, at the Leibniz University of Hannover. Prior to this, she held a position as Visiting Professor at the Johannes-Gutenberg University of Mainz and as Assistant Professor at the University of Hamburg. She holds a doctorate from ETH Zurich, under the supervision of Jan-Egbert Sturm at the KOF Swiss Economic Institute. She was also awarded an MSc in Economics & Econometrics from the University of Kent as well as the title Diplom Volkswirtin from the Department of Economics and Politics of the University of Hamburg.