This dissertation's unifying theme is the study of subjective data, with particular emphasis on subjective expectations. Eliciting expectations of survey respondents has become a frequent practice in economics over the last decade. This thesis presents studies of such data, analyzing expectations of future income, behavior of participants in an economic experiment, reform of the Dutch pension system, and perceived survival probabilities at older ages. Some chapters focus on the study of expectations per se, analyzing, for instance, who are the individuals reporting higher probabilities that a given outcome will realize, or discussing the rationality of these expectations. Several chapters discuss important econometric issues in the analysis of subjective expectations, proposing ways to estimate models including this information or discussing the importance of heterogeneity in expectations to identify key preference parameters in an economic model. The last chapter discusses an approach to estimate a life-cycle model without having to elicit detailed expectations by relying on stated preferences, another type of subjective data.
