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Speech by Boris Vujčić, Vice-President of the ECB, at the inauguration of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship awarded to Professor Michael Weber at the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) Berlin
Berlin, 1 September 2026
Introduction
Thank you, Michael, and thank you to ESMT for the invitation. It is a pleasure to be here for this inauguration and to speak about a topic to which Michael has made an outstanding contribution: how households form expectations and why those expectations matter for monetary policy.
Monetary policy is, by its nature, forward-looking. We track inflation, wages, consumption, credit and financial conditions. But none of these data fully tell us what households believe and how these beliefs feed into their economic and financial decisions, how uncertain they are, or why similar shocks produce different responses across population sub-groups and countries.
The insights from expectations surveys matter, because expectations about the future…
