The new center, known as the EEC, is led by Michael Weber, an economist at ESMT Berlin and a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, one of Germany’s most prestigious endowed research awards. According to the announcement, the center examines how households, firms, and financial market participants form expectations about economic developments and how these expectations influence economic behavior. That tripartite focus is significant. Much of the existing literature on expectations has concentrated on one actor at a time, typically households in household surveys or professional forecasters in financial contexts. A center designed from the outset to span all three groups reflects a growing recognition among economists that expectations do not form in isolation, but interact across the economy in ways that can amplify or dampen economic shocks.

The intellectual case for the center rests on a body of research that has transformed macroeconomics over the past two decades. Expectations about the economic future shape many of the decisions made by individuals and businesses: how much they spend or save, whether they invest, and how they plan for the long term. In theoretical models, anticipated inflation, expected income growth, and perceived employment risk all enter the calculus that determines consumption and investment. But empirical work has repeatedly shown that the expectations held by ordinary people diverge sharply from those of professional economists. Households often misjudge inflation levels, react asymmetrically to price increases and decreases, and update their beliefs in response to salient personal experiences rather than statistical aggregates. These deviations matter, because if expectations drive behavior, then systematic biases in expectations can produce systematic patterns in aggregate economic outcomes.

The better expectations are understood, the more reliably researchers can assess how individuals and organizations respond to economic shocks, market developments, and public communication. This point has taken on particular urgency since the inflation surge that followed the pandemic era, when central banks across Europe and North America discovered how difficult it is to gauge what the public actually believes about future prices. Survey measures of inflation expectations rose alongside realized inflation, and policymakers debated whether those beliefs had become unanchored, a scenario in which the public loses faith that inflation will return to target and behaves in ways that make the fear self-fulfilling. The episode underscored a lesson that the EEC’s research agenda takes as a starting point: reliable, high-frequency, well-designed measurement of expectations is not a luxury but a prerequisite for sound economic management.

To examine these dynamics, the center has organized its research program around four key areas. The first concerns households and how individuals form expectations about inflation, income, employment, and broader economic conditions. Research in this area typically draws on large-scale surveys that ask respondents not only for point forecasts but also for the uncertainty they attach to those forecasts, the information they use, and how their answers change when they receive new information. A second area examines how firms form expectations and how those expectations shape investment, hiring, and pricing decisions. Firm-level expectations have attracted growing attention because corporate beliefs about future demand, costs, and interest rates directly determine hiring plans and price setting, the channels through which expectations translate into realized inflation and employment.

The third area is financial markets, where expectations play a central role in investment decisions, asset pricing, and broader market behavior. Financial market participants are, in a formal sense, professional expectation formers, yet research has documented persistent heterogeneity in their beliefs, herding behavior, and sensitivity to framing and communication. The fourth area covers monetary policy and communication, examining how central bank actions and communication influence the economic expectations of households, firms, and financial market participants. This last area connects the center directly to one of the most consequential policy questions of the era: how words from a central bank move beliefs, and why the same message may persuade markets while leaving the broader public largely unaffected.

Weber framed the mission in terms of data. To better understand economic developments, he said, researchers need reliable data on what people and businesses think and how their assessments change over time. With the European Expectations Center, he said, the aim is to collect this data and make it available for research and economic policy debates. The emphasis on data infrastructure rather than on any single study suggests that the center sees itself as a platform for the wider research community. Survey-based expectations research is notoriously resource-intensive: designing questionnaires that avoid framing biases, recruiting representative samples, fielding surveys at sufficient frequency to capture dynamics, and harmonizing measures across countries all require sustained funding and technical expertise that individual research projects rarely command.

Toward that end, the EEC plans to provide the research community with extensive datasets and research resources, including survey datasets, questionnaires and survey instruments, working papers, and research outputs. Making survey instruments openly available is a deceptively important contribution. When researchers use comparable questions across countries and over time, their findings can be pooled, replicated, and extended, accelerating cumulative progress in a field where results have often been fragmented across bespoke surveys. The center also intends to work with partners to support knowledge exchange, develop new research initiatives, and disseminate findings to academic, policy, and practitioner audiences. Its current partner is the Bank for International Settlements, the Basel-based institution often described as the central bank for central banks, whose involvement signals an interest in connecting academic measurement work directly to the policy institutions that depend on it.

The European setting gives the project particular relevance. The euro area presents a distinctive laboratory for expectations research, because monetary policy is set at the supranational level while economic conditions vary considerably across member states. Households in different countries may experience the same monetary policy decision very differently, depending on their local inflation rates, housing markets, and labor conditions, and their divergent expectations can complicate the transmission of policy. A European center dedicated to expectations research is positioned to document these differences systematically and to test how communication strategies can be designed to reach heterogeneous publics. The involvement of researchers based at a leading international business school in Berlin also bridges the traditionally separate literatures on household expectations, corporate decision-making, and financial markets.

For the broader public, the stakes of this research agenda are easy to state. Expectations are the hinge between economic news and economic behavior: a headline about inflation matters only insofar as it changes what people believe and therefore what they do. If researchers can measure those beliefs accurately, identify when and why they go wrong, and understand which forms of communication correct them, then forecasts improve, policies become better targeted, and the damaging feedback loops that turn fear into recession or optimism into overheating become easier to manage. The European Expectations Center will not answer those questions on its own, but by building the shared data foundation on which such answers depend, it aims to give economists, central bankers, and policymakers a clearer view of the beliefs that quietly steer the economy.

Subject of Research: Formation of economic expectations among households, firms, and financial market participants and their influence on economic behavior

Article Title: ESMT Berlin establishes European Expectations Center for research on economic expectations

Article References: ESMT Berlin establishes European Expectations Center for research on economic expectations. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: ESMT Berlin, European Expectations Center, Michael Weber, economic expectations, inflation expectations, household surveys, firm expectations, financial markets, monetary policy, central bank communication, Bank for International Settlements, economic behavior

The study’s central contribution is to quantify, at a scale rarely attempted, the relationship between seagrass-associated fishing and household poverty. Survey teams working across community networks in Southeast Asia, Melanesia and the western Indian Ocean gathered household-level data on income, food consumption, fishing effort and habitat use. By combining these social surveys with ecological assessments of seagrass extent and condition, the researchers were able to estimate what share of household income and nutrition flows directly from seagrass fisheries, and how that share varies with household wealth. The answer, they report, is striking: in many communities, seagrass-adjacent fishing contributes a substantial portion of the protein consumed by the poorest quartile of households, far exceeding its contribution to wealthier families in the same villages.

This pattern reflects the particular ecological and economic character of seagrass systems. Unlike offshore fisheries that require boats, fuel and capital, seagrass meadows sit within walking distance of shore, accessible at low tide and by canoe, gleaning and hand-collection. Women, children and landless households — groups often excluded from formal fisheries statistics — harvest fish, octopus, clams, sea cucumbers and other invertebrates from these shallow grounds. Because seagrass fishing requires little investment, it functions as what economists would call a poverty buffer: a low-barrier resource that families fall back on when crops fail, fish prices collapse or formal employment disappears. The new analysis shows that this buffering role intensifies precisely when households are most vulnerable.

The technical core of the study lies in its integration of household survey data with habitat mapping across such a broad geographic range. Rather than studying a single village or country, the team assembled a comparative dataset spanning 156 communities, allowing them to distinguish local idiosyncrasies from regional patterns. They constructed indicators of household poverty that combine income measures with dietary diversity and asset ownership, and then modeled the association between dependence on seagrass-associated fishing and these poverty indicators. Statistical controls for community size, market access, reef and mangrove proximity, and fishing pressure helped isolate the specific contribution of seagrass habitats. The consistency of the signal across dozens of independent communities strengthens the case that the pattern is structural rather than incidental.

Why has this dependence remained so poorly documented? The researchers point to a combination of institutional blind spots. Official fisheries statistics in most countries are designed around landed catches brought to ports and markets, categories that capture trawl and purse-seine activity but miss gleaning and subsistence harvesting. Seagrass meadows, meanwhile, have historically received a fraction of the scientific and philanthropic attention devoted to coral reefs and mangroves, and they remain largely absent from marine protected area networks. Conservation planning in the region has often prioritized biodiversity targets and carbon storage goals without systematic assessment of who depends on which habitats for subsistence. The result is a policy landscape in which an ecosystem supporting millions of the world’s poorest coastal residents is managed, at best, incidentally.

The poverty dimensions of this oversight carry real consequences. When marine protected areas are established around seagrass beds without provision for continued access, or when seagrass meadows are degraded by coastal development, dredging, anchoring and land-based pollution, the resulting losses do not fall evenly across communities. Wealthier households can shift to other incomes, buy protein at markets or relocate fishing effort offshore. Poorer households, the study shows, have fewer alternatives and face immediate nutritional and financial harm. In effect, conservation interventions that appear ecologically neutral can function as regressive shocks, transferring costs from the global benefits of biodiversity protection onto the local poor. The authors frame this as a matter not only of food security but of distributional justice in environmental policy.

The findings also complicate a common conservation narrative in which protecting habitats automatically protects fisheries. Seagrass meadows do support juvenile fish, sequester carbon, stabilize sediments and improve water quality, and safeguarding them is essential to the long-term productivity of tropical coastal waters. But the study emphasizes that habitat protection and livelihood protection are not the same thing. A closed area may allow seagrass biomass to recover while simultaneously cutting off the poorest fishers from the resource, unless access rules, seasonal rotations or alternative livelihoods are built into the design. The researchers argue that conservation effectiveness and social outcomes must be evaluated together, and that the households most dependent on a habitat should be identified before management decisions are made, not after harm has occurred.

Methodologically, the study demonstrates the value of coupling fine-grained social measurement with ecological data across large spatial scales. Poverty is multidimensional, and its relationship to ecosystem use is context-dependent, shaped by tenure arrangements, gender norms, market access and seasonal dynamics. By aggregating standardized surveys across 156 sites, the team produced findings robust enough to inform regional policy while retaining the community-level resolution needed to target interventions. The approach offers a template for other ecosystems — mangroves, floodplains, dry forests — where reliance by poor households is suspected but poorly quantified. In each case, the same question applies: which households lose what when the habitat is degraded or closed, and can any compensatory mechanism realistically reach them?

The policy implications are concrete. The authors call for seagrass ecosystems to be explicitly incorporated into national fisheries assessments, poverty reduction strategies and marine spatial planning. They urge that gleaning and shallow-water harvesting — activities dominated by women and marginalized groups — be recognized in fisheries governance rather than treated as informal residue. And they recommend that marine protected area design in seagrass regions adopt social safeguards comparable to those used in terrestrial conservation, including participatory zoning, temporary rather than permanent closures, and monitoring of household nutrition alongside ecological indicators. Without such measures, they warn, marine conservation risks widening the very inequalities that undermine long-term stewardship, as communities excluded from resources have little incentive to protect them.

For the millions of people living in poor coastal settlements across the Indo-Pacific, the study gives statistical weight to something they have long known: the green meadows beneath the shallows are not scenery but supper, savings and insurance. As nations negotiate global biodiversity targets and blue economy investments, the research serves as a reminder that the ocean’s contributions to people are distributed unevenly, and that counting them accurately is a prerequisite for conserving them fairly. What happens to seagrass, the study concludes, is inseparable from what happens to the world’s coastal poor — and marine conservation will only succeed as a global enterprise when it learns to see, and protect, both at once.

Subject of Research: The relationship between seagrass-associated fishing and household poverty across Indo-Pacific coastal communities

Article Title: Seagrass fisheries expose the poverty dimensions of marine conservation

Article References: Jones, B. L. H., Unsworth, R. K. F., Ambo-Rappe, R., Carli, F., Coals, L., Digdo, A. A., Eklöf, J. S., Jiddawi, N. S., La Nafie, Y. A., Lopez, M. R., Nordlund, L. M., Septiani, C., Udagedara, S., & Cullen-Unsworth, L. C. (2026). Seagrass fisheries expose the poverty dimensions of marine conservation. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-026-01932-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41893-026-01932-6

Keywords: seagrass, marine conservation, poverty, Indo-Pacific, fisheries, coastal livelihoods, food security, marine protected areas, gleaning, ecosystem dependence, blue economy, household surveys