This paper studies whether households are selectively inattentive to interest rates and examines its macroeconomic implications. We first use existing and newly-designed household surveys to establish that households close to durables purchases actively acquire more information about interest rates and have more accurate, less dispersed, and less uncertain interest rate expectations. Next, we use this evidence to calibrate an incomplete markets model with durable consumption and endogenous information acquisition about interest rates through rational inattention. Finally, we quantify how selective inattention changes aggregate consumption responses to interest rates. Relative to exogenous inattention, selective inattention shifts the composition of spending responses to interest rate cuts, accelerates the impact of larger cuts, and generates dampened responses to changes in volatility that are closer to empirical evidence.
